DeepSeek vs Yi Model

A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.

DeepSeek China's frontier open-weight LLM lab — now shipping the V4 family at a... Visit Yi Model 01.AI's Yi model family — frontier development paused, company pivoted... Visit
RECATOOLS Score 8.2 / 10 6.8 / 10
Capability 9 7
Value for money 10 7.5
Ease of use 7 6
ASEAN readiness 5 5
API quality 8 6.5
Pricing Open Source Open Source
Free tier Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable Free to download
Paid from V4-Flash $0.14/$0.28; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens (now permanent, not promo)
Has API
Open source
Free to use
Users ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) 500k+ downloads
Founded 2023 2023
Maker High-Flyer 01.AI
Verdict

DeepSeek is the Chinese lab whose open-weight models repeatedly shock the market by matching far costlier frontier systems at a fraction of the price. The 2026 V4 family (V4-Pro and the cheaper V4-Flash, both 1M-context)...

Yi is the LLM family from 01.AI, offered as open weights with notably strong bilingual Chinese-English performance that made it one of the more respected open-model lineages of 2023–24. For teams needing solid Chinese-la...

Full review → Full review →
← Back to AI Directory

Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.