DeepSeek vs ChatGPT vs Mistral AI vs Llama
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
DeepSeek
Hangzhou lab shipping MIT-licensed V4 models and a very cheap API
Visit
|
ChatGPT
OpenAI's assistant, now on GPT-6, with Work agents and Codex built in
Visit
|
Mistral AI
Paris model lab with open weights, cheap APIs and the Vibe agent
Visit
|
Llama
Meta's downloadable LLM family, last updated with Llama 4 in April 202...
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 8.2 / 10 | 9.2 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Free chat on the web and in the app; MIT-licensed open weights to self-host | Unlimited text chats with GPT-6 Luna (abuse guardrails apply); limited uploads, images, voice, deep research, Codex and Work | Vibe Free: limited messages, web searches and coding sessions, basic image generation, 100+ connectors; Apache 2.0 weights free to self-host | Free weight downloads (Llama 2, 3.x and 4) under Meta's Llama community licences, after accepting the licence |
| Paid from | $0.15 per 1M input tokens (deepseek-flash, cache miss, off-peak); $0.30 at peak | SGD 11/month (Go, Singapore price); Plus $20/month; Pro from $100/month | $14.99/month (Vibe Pro, excluding tax); API from $0.10 per million tokens | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | ~900M weekly active users (1B+ monthly active app users as of mid-2026) | 500k+ API users | 10m+ downloads |
| Founded | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | High-Flyer | OpenAI | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Meta Platforms |
| Verdict | DeepSeek remains the price benchmark for capable models: V4.1-Flash costs $0.15 to $0.30 per million input tokens and V4-Pro under $4 per million output at peak, both with 1M-token context, and the weights are MIT-licens... |
ChatGPT remains the default general-purpose assistant: GPT-6 since October 2026, Intelligent UI answers, voice, images, deep research, and ChatGPT Work and Codex for longer agent jobs, all in one app. The free plan now o... |
Mistral is a good choice when you want models you can host yourself or buy cheaply by the token: Small 4, Large 3 and the Ministral 3 models are Apache 2.0, and API rates sit well below most US frontier labs. The Vibe ag... |
Llama 2 and 3 made Meta's family the default starting point for self-hosted and fine-tuned models, and the weights from Llama 2 through Llama 4 remain free to download from Hugging Face and Kaggle. Llama 4 Scout and Mave... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.