DeepSeek V4 Flash vs o3-mini

Pick DeepSeek V4 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o3-mini only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.

DeepSeek V4 Flash has the cleaner provisional overall profile here, landing at 59 versus 56. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.

DeepSeek V4 Flash's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 57.1 against 49.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 73.7% to 49.3%. o3-mini does hit back in knowledge, 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 $0.14 input / $0.28 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V4 Flash. That is roughly 15.7x on output cost alone. o3-mini is the reasoning model in the pair, while DeepSeek V4 Flash 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. DeepSeek V4 Flash gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for o3-mini.