DeepSeek Reasoner (R1) vs Qwen 3 Coder

Performance benchmarks + pricing comparison — updated April 2026

DeepSeek Reasoner (R1)

DeepSeek

DeepSeek's reasoning model. Comparable to OpenAI's o1 but at much lower cost.

Input$0.550/M
Output$2.19/M
Context128K tokens
Best ForComplex reasoning, math, advanced coding
Benchmark72/100

Qwen 3 Coder

Qwen

Latest Qwen coding-specialized model. Strong performance on HumanEval and competitive programming benchmarks.

Input$0.500/M
Output$2.00/M
Context256K tokens
Best ForCode generation, competitive programming, Chinese/English bilingual coding

Cost Comparison by Scenario

Estimated cost per project with 30% cache hit rate. Actual costs may vary based on usage patterns.

ScenarioDeepSeek Reasoner (R1)Qwen 3 CoderSavings
Small Script (1K lines) $0.08 $0.08 Qwen 3 Coder saves <$0.01 (9%)
Medium Feature (10K lines) $0.63 $0.57 Qwen 3 Coder saves $0.06 (9%)
Large Project (50K lines) $3.15 $2.88 Qwen 3 Coder saves $0.28 (9%)
Code Review (5K lines) $0.15 $0.14 Qwen 3 Coder saves $0.01 (9%)

Verdict

Qwen 3 Coder wins on both price and performance — $0.500/M input with a benchmark score of N/A/100.

For most developers, this is the clear choice between these two models.

Compare with Other Models