Gemini 3.1 Pro vs DeepSeek V4-Pro
Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro and DeepSeek's DeepSeek V4-Pro both target production language workloads, but they price and behave differently. Here is the side-by-side.
Pricing checked against provider documentation on . How we verify
The short answer
DeepSeek V4-Pro is the cheaper option — roughly 4.5x less on a blended workload, and it suits frontier-adjacent reasoning at open-weight prices. Gemini 3.1 Pro justifies its premium when you need best price-to-reasoning ratio.
Google • Gemini 3.1
$2.00 / $12.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
Google's shipping flagship while 3.5 Pro remains unreleased, and the cheapest frontier model by a wide margin. It still tops several hard-reasoning boards including GPQA Diamond and ARC-AGI-2, making it the value choice for research-style workloads — provided you keep prompts under 200K tokens, where the price doubles.
DeepSeek • DeepSeek V4
$0.66 / $1.98
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
A 1.6T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 49B active, released under MIT and callable through DeepSeek's own API with configurable reasoning effort. Since 16 August 2026 DeepSeek bills on a peak/off-peak schedule, so the hour you run a job changes the bill by exactly 2x — which makes it unusually well suited to scheduled batch work.
Input price
DeepSeek V4-Pro is 67% cheaper than Gemini 3.1 Pro on input tokens.
Output price
DeepSeek V4-Pro is 84% cheaper than Gemini 3.1 Pro on output tokens — usually the side that dominates the bill.
Monthly cost at three workload sizes
Standard (non-batch, non-cached) rates. Reasoning models will exceed these figures because thinking tokens bill as output.
| Workload | Gemini 3.1 Pro | DeepSeek V4-Pro | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $4 | $1 | $3 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $44 | $11 | $33 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $440 | $106 | $334 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Gemini 3.1 Pro | DeepSeek V4-Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $2.00 | $0.66 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $12.00 | $1.98 |
| Cached input | — | $0.02 |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 65,536 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Native reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-06 | 2026-03 |
| Relative latency | medium | medium |
| Open weights | No | MIT |
| API model ID | gemini-3.1-pro-preview | deepseek-v4-pro |
| Status | preview | stable |
Gemini 3.1 Pro: Prompts over 200K tokens reprice to $4 input / $18 output per 1M.
DeepSeek V4-Pro: Off-peak rate shown. Peak rates are exactly double ($1.32 input / $3.96 output) during 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday. Cache hits cost roughly 3% of a cache miss.
Choose Gemini 3.1 Pro if…
- Hard reasoning and research tasks
- Long-context document and video analysis
- Native multimodal pipelines
- Cost-conscious frontier workloads
Choose DeepSeek V4-Pro if…
- Overnight batch reasoning jobs
- Self-hosted deployments needing MIT terms
- Cost-sensitive coding agents
- Chinese-language workloads
Frequently asked
Is Gemini 3.1 Pro or DeepSeek V4-Pro cheaper?
DeepSeek V4-Pro is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 4.5x less than Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Which has the larger context window, Gemini 3.1 Pro or DeepSeek V4-Pro?
Gemini 3.1 Pro has the larger window at 1.05M tokens versus 1M.
Should I use Gemini 3.1 Pro or DeepSeek V4-Pro?
Pick Gemini 3.1 Pro for best price-to-reasoning ratio. Pick DeepSeek V4-Pro for frontier-adjacent reasoning at open-weight prices. If cost dominates the decision, DeepSeek V4-Pro wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.