OpenAI's ChatGPT has been the biggest name in AI chatbots since it launched in 2022. Now, though, the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek is coming for its crown. After announcing a couple of big technological achievements at the start of 2025, DeepSeek rocketed up the app store charts. But just how does it stack up to ChatGPT?
Before we dig in, a note on naming conventions. I've been writing about AI models for a decade, and things continue to be confusing:
DeepSeek is the name of a family of AI models, a chatbot that uses them, and the company that developed them all.
ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses models called things like GPT-4o and o1-mini. (And yes, that's the correct capitalization).
I'll try to keep things as clear as possible, but the main two things we're comparing today are ChatGPT the chatbot and DeepSeek the chatbot.
Table of contents:
ChatGPT vs. DeepSeek at a glance
ChatGPT and DeepSeek are both easy-to-use AI chatbots, so they're broadly similar. Here's a quick look at how they stack up, but I'll dive deeper into some of the bigger differences below.
| DeepSeek | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
AI models | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ State-of-the-art AI models | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ State-of-the-art AI models |
Features | ⭐️⭐️ Reasoning and search, but not many other extras for now | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The most advanced AI chatbot around |
Free plan | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Offers everything on its free plan | ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Solid, but it lacks a lot of features |
Price | N/A—It's all free | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ At $20/month, ChatGPT Plus is well worth the cost |
Security | ⭐️ Sends data to China | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Now a secure enterprise app |
Both ChatGPT and DeepSeek offer powerful models
AI models are fast reaching the point where one-to-one comparisons are silly. Unless you're really pushing the limits of what AI language models are capable of (which comes with a whole host of risks), they're largely interchangeable. Every good large language model (LLM) can now draft emails, edit blog posts, help you brainstorm, make code suggestions, and basically anything else you can think of.
Both ChatGPT and DeepSeek offer powerful, modern AI models. As I write this in February 2025, ChatGPT currently offers:
While DeepSeek offers:
DeepSeek V3
DeepSeek R1
GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and DeepSeek V3 are typical LLMs (or LMMs) that are great for generating text responses. They're relatively fast and often have more features.
o1, o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1 are reasoning models. They take more time to respond but use chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes them better at challenging reasoning, scientific, and coding problems, but less useful for drafting an email.
In the charts above from Artificial Analysis, you can see how the various models stack up on different benchmarks. The performance differences between the different models is slight. By far, the largest gap is between the reasoning models and the typical language models, so again, unless you're really pushing the limits of these chatbots, chances are you'll get great results with whatever model you use—so long as it's appropriate to the task.
ChatGPT is far more polished and feature-filled
ChatGPT has been one of the most important apps of the past few years, and it shows. Compared to DeepSeek, it's packed with additional features. Here are some of the big ones:
Image support. ChatGPT can understand uploaded images, charts, and other graphics. It can also generate images using DALL·E 3.
Voice mode. You can talk to ChatGPT. Advanced voice mode even allows you to interrupt the AI or use your camera for live vision support.
Custom instructions and memory. You can give ChatGPT specific instructions or ask it to remember details about you. It will then use these to tailor its responses.
Integrations. ChatGPT is built in to a lot of apps you use every day, and it even integrates with Zapier, so you can access it from any app you use. Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT, or try one of these templates.
Create email copy with ChatGPT from new Gmail emails and save as drafts in GmailCreate email copy with ChatGPT from new Gmail emails and save as drafts in Gmail
Create ChatGPT conversations from new tl;dv transcriptsCreate ChatGPT conversations from new tl;dv transcripts
Canvas. ChatGPT Canvas is a Google Docs-like workspace for AI-human collaboration on writing and coding tasks.
Custom GPTs. You can create your own custom ChatGPT.
Windows and Mac apps. ChatGPT has desktop apps, while DeepSeek is only available on the web and through smartphone apps.
Scheduled tasks. ChatGPT can do things at certain times when you set up scheduled tasks.
Projects and other organizational features. It's not super robust, but ChatGPT helps you keep your AI chatbot conversations in order.
Team support. If you use ChatGPT for your company, you can get extra collaboration features.
On top of all that, ChatGPT is just more polished. DeepSeek feels exactly like what it is: an under-development app that's suddenly exploded in popularity. Presumably some of these features will follow, but it could be a while.
DeepSeek wins on price and access
DeepSeek shot to popularity for three main reasons:
Its models are essentially as good as OpenAI's.
Its models are open, so anyone can download them, run them, and even customize them.
Its models are significantly cheaper to run.
Offering the same performance with more control at a lower price point was a big statement, and it's the reason we're looking at the two chatbots today.
While the open angle is the most interesting in the long term, it's less relevant to comparing the two chatbots. Unless you're building an AI-powered app and trying to decide whether to pay for o1 or DeepSeek R1 API, or even run your own instance of DeepSeek R1, it's not really important.
Instead, what matters is that DeepSeek is currently completely free. Through the web app and smartphone apps, you get access to DeepSeek's top models without many limits. It seems that you might be capped at 50 DeepSeek R1 messages per day, but I haven't been able to verify that.
There's a free ChatGPT plan, but it's got far more limits. You get access to GPT-4o mini, limited access to GPT-4o and o3-mini, standard voice mode, and a more limited feature set overall. To get a lot of the features that make ChatGPT so great, you need to pay $20/month for ChatGPT Plus.
But DeepSeek has more quirks
DeepSeek is an incredibly impressive accomplishment. Because of international sanctions, the Chinese team had to use less powerful graphics cards to develop their models. To still be able to match OpenAI's model performance shows the level of technical innovation that was involved.
But just because I really appreciate DeepSeek as a technological innovation, doesn't mean I think the app is perfect. The explosive growth shows. Occasionally, the servers just won't respond for a few minutes. And it really is missing a lot of very useful features, like vision. I use ChatGPT to pull information from images almost as often as I use it to do anything else.
Then there's the elephant in the room. DeepSeek is based in China, so anything you enter in DeepSeek could be accessed by the Chinese government and intelligence services. If you're just using DeepSeek to write emails, this might not be a big deal. But if you're using it for anything professional or sensitive, it probably rules DeepSeek out. There's also a non-zero chance that the US or EU will crack down on DeepSeek in the next couple of months, so relying on it could be a bad idea.
Similarly, every chatbot has some level of content filtering and censorship. ChatGPT will try to avoid telling you how to do something violent or commit fraud, for example. With DeepSeek, that censorship extends to topics the Chinese government finds objectionable. This includes things like tank man, Taiwan, and the Dalai Lama.
Is DeepSeek better than ChatGPT?
DeepSeek demonstrates some fascinating technological achievements. If you have the skills to download the models and run them yourself, it's really exciting. Similarly, if you just want to try out a powerful AI chatbot for free, then it's worth a look.
But ChatGPT really wins in most instances. While the free plan comes with a few limitations, the $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan offers great value. It's packed with features, the data handling is more transparent than with DeepSeek, you can use it professionally, and it's just a lot more useful. I use it daily and plan to continue doing so.
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