DeepSeek V3 vs o3

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

o3 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 41 to 25. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

o3's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 82.9 against 24.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SimpleQA, 24.9% to 84%. DeepSeek V3 does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $10.00 input / $40.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.27 input / $1.10 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V3. That is roughly 36.4x on output cost alone. o3 is the reasoning model in the pair, while DeepSeek V3 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. o3 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for DeepSeek V3.

Quick Verdict

Pick o3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. DeepSeek V3 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Agentic

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Coding

o3

DeepSeek V3

42

o3

78

42%
SWE-bench Verified
Coming soon
Coming soon
HumanEval
78%

Multimodal & Grounded

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Reasoning

o3

DeepSeek V3

24.9

o3

82.9

24.9%
SimpleQA
84%
Coming soon
MuSR
82%

Knowledge

DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3

69.6

o3

57.2

59.1%
GPQA
83.3%
88.5%
MMLU
93.4%
75.9%
MMLU-Pro
Coming soon
Coming soon
SuperGPQA
85%
Coming soon
OpenBookQA
83%
Coming soon
HLE
24.9%

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Multilingual

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Mathematics

DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3

90.2

o3

87

39.2%
AIME 2024
95.2%
90.2%
MATH-500
Coming soon
Coming soon
AIME 2023
88%
Coming soon
AIME 2025
98.4%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2023
84%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2024
86%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2025
85%
Coming soon
BRUMO 2025
87%

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, DeepSeek V3 or o3?

o3 is ahead overall, 41 to 25. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SimpleQA, where the scores are 24.9% and 84%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, DeepSeek V3 or o3?

DeepSeek V3 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 69.6 versus 57.2. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, DeepSeek V3 or o3?

o3 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 78 versus 42. DeepSeek V3 stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Which is better for math, DeepSeek V3 or o3?

DeepSeek V3 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 90.2 versus 87. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, DeepSeek V3 or o3?

o3 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 24.9. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 17, 2026

Weekly LLM Benchmark Digest

Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.

Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.