The Known Good Updated 29 Jul 2026
DeepSeek: R1 vs OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ·DeepSeek vs OpenAI

DeepSeek: R1 vs OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — head-to-head comparison

DeepSeek: R1 profile OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini profile All comparisons
DeepSeek: R1 — DeepSeek
Quality
#21 of 62
75based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#154 of 317
49.1
Output tokens per second
Price
#222 of 370
$1.15
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.70 · Out $2.50
Cache hit price
unranked
—
per 1M tokens
Context
#251 of 375
164k
tokens (~300 pages)
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#33 of 62
67based on 6 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#66 of 317
82.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#168 of 370
$0.69
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.25 · Out $2.00
Cache hit price
#44 of 238
$0.025
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#118 of 375
400k
tokens (~600 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, DeepSeek: R1 scores 75 and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini scores 67 — a 8-point lead for DeepSeek: R1. They share 3 published evaluations, with DeepSeek: R1 ahead on 0 and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ahead on 3.

Blended pricing is $1.15 per 1M tokens for DeepSeek: R1 and $0.69 for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is about 1.7× cheaper.

Throughput is 49 tokens per second for DeepSeek: R1 and 83 for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini, with time to first token at 1.2s and 4.5s. DeepSeek: R1 accepts 164k tokens of context against 400k.

DeepSeek: R1 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted); OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is proprietary. 3 tracked hosts serve one or both, and 1 serve both.

Generated from tracked data on 29 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Known Good Index 75 based on 4 of 7 evaluations 67 based on 6 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $1.15 $0.69
Output tok/s 49 83
Context window 164k 400k
Providers 2 2
Jump to section

Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Known Good Index 75 67
Coding Index — 50
Mathematics Index 74 93
Reasoning Index 77 57
Agentic Index — 50
Openness Index 60 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = DeepSeek: R1 · marker = OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond69 / 75
Mock AIME 2024–2553 / 87
MATH Level 593 / 98

Right-hand figures read DeepSeek: R1 / OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini. DeepSeek: R1 leads on 0 of 3, OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini on 3.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Text Arena 1,373 —
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,398 —
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Input $/1M $0.70 $0.25
Output $/1M $2.50 $2.00
Blended $/1M $1.15 $0.69
Cache read $/1M — $0.025
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Context window 164k 400k
Max output tokens 16k 128k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Output tokens/s 49 83
Time to first token 1.2s 4.5s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

3 hosts · 1 serve both
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider DeepSeek: R1 blendedDeepSeek: R1 tok/s OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini blendedOpenAI: GPT-5 Mini tok/s
Azure · first party $2.60 64 $0.69 76
Novita $1.15 32 — —
OpenAI · first party — — $0.34 103

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →