DeepSeek V3 vs o3-mini

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

o3-mini has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 28 versus 25. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.

o3-mini's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 77.2 against 69.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is AIME 2024, 39.2% to 87.3%. DeepSeek V3 does hit back in mathematics, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o3-mini is also the more expensive model on tokens at $1.10 input / $4.40 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.27 input / $1.10 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V3. That is roughly 4.0x on output cost alone. o3-mini 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-mini gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for DeepSeek V3.

Quick Verdict

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

Agentic

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Coding

o3-mini

DeepSeek V3

42

o3-mini

49.3

42%
SWE-bench Verified
49.3%

Multimodal & Grounded

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Reasoning

Coming soon

Comparable scores for this category are coming soon. One or both models do not have sourced results here yet.

24.9%
SimpleQA
Coming soon

Knowledge

o3-mini

DeepSeek V3

69.6

o3-mini

77.2

59.1%
GPQA
77.2%
88.5%
MMLU
86.9%
75.9%
MMLU-Pro
Coming soon

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Comparable scores for this category are coming soon. One or both models do not have sourced results here yet.

Coming soon
IFEval
93.9%

Multilingual

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Mathematics

DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3

90.2

o3-mini

87.3

39.2%
AIME 2024
87.3%
90.2%
MATH-500
Coming soon

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, DeepSeek V3 or o3-mini?

o3-mini is ahead overall, 28 to 25. The biggest single separator in this matchup is AIME 2024, where the scores are 39.2% and 87.3%.

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

o3-mini has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 69.6. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, DeepSeek V3 or o3-mini?

o3-mini has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 49.3 versus 42. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, DeepSeek V3 or o3-mini?

DeepSeek V3 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 90.2 versus 87.3. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 17, 2026

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