# Beam vs DeepSeek

Beam records 0 monthly visits with -100% month-over-month growth and Paid pricing. DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [Beam](https://openaitools.app/tool/beam) | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://getbeam.ai | https://www.deepseek.com |
| Categories | AI Assistant, AI Chatbot, AI Copilot, AI PDF | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot |
| Pricing Model | Paid | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 0 | 372,761,591 |
| MoM Growth Rate | -100% | +4.3% |
| Primary Market | Global | China |
| Direct Visits | 0 | 291,585,405 |
| Review Score | 4.2 | 4.8 |
| Saved Count | 3 | 44 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## Beam

Beam is built for people who live inside a handful of macOS apps and are tired of switching to a browser tab every time they want an AI answer. Rather than re-implementing a chat window, it bolts a lightweight, native launcher onto your desktop: press a hotkey, a small panel appears above whatever you are doing, and the result can be pushed straight back into the current field. Because it is written natively rather than in Electron, it starts quickly and uses little memory, and its creators emphasize that it is sandboxed and only talks to OpenAI's servers.

Beyond the basic chat panel, Beam layers in productivity plumbing. Templates let you turn frequently repeated prompts into fill-in-the-blank forms, profiles keep different assistants (a copywriter, a coder, a translator) configured with the right model and instructions, and PDF support turns long documents into something you can interrogate. Screen capture is exposed through the same hotkey model, so asking about a chart, an error message, or a design can be done without saving a file first.

Beam is a third-party client and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI; it uses the OpenAI API, so you bring your own API key and pay OpenAI for usage separately. It is distributed as a paid macOS app on a pay-what-you-want basis, with no subscription required and no login to the vendor's servers.

**Pricing & Plans:** One-time, pay-what-you-want purchase for the macOS app with no subscription. You supply your own OpenAI API key and pay OpenAI separately for the tokens you use. The site offers a free trial and a refund policy.

- **Hotkey access from anywhere:** Hit a global hotkey to open a floating chat panel over any app, ask a question, and drop the answer back into your document or field without switching windows.
- **Inline text editing:** Select a text snippet, chat about it, and insert the improved version back into your app with a single keystroke.
- **Chat with your screen:** Grab a screen region with a hotkey and ask ChatGPT to explain, transcribe, or describe what is shown in it.
- **Prompt templates:** Save frequently used prompts as reusable templates with blank fields, so repetitive writing tasks like emails or blog drafts take seconds.
- **AI profiles:** Create named AI profiles that pin a model and system instructions to a persona, so every conversation keeps the right tone and context.
- **Chat with PDFs:** Open and question PDF files directly to pull summaries, answers, and key points out of long documents.

**Strengths:** Native macOS build keeps memory use low and response times snappy; Global hotkey access means no window juggling or context switching; Templates and AI profiles cut repetitive prompt writing; Sandboxed design and local key storage reduce privacy concerns

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/beam.md)

## DeepSeek

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd.) is a frontier AI research organization that disrupted the global LLM market by pairing open-weight transparency with breakthrough Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and reinforcement-learning reasoning efficiency. Following the landmark releases of DeepSeek-V3 and the peer-reviewed DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, DeepSeek introduced the DeepSeek-V4 generation in 2026—featuring a hybrid attention architecture and a native 1-million-token context window across DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active per token) and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (284B total parameters, 13B active per token).

Users can interact with DeepSeek in three ways: completely free through the consumer web portal (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps with one-click toggles for deep thinking and live web search; via DeepSeek's hosted, OpenAI-compatible developer API; or by self-hosting DeepSeek's open-weight checkpoints (including V3, R1, Prover-V2, and distilled Qwen/Llama variants) on private infrastructure. The models excel at competitive mathematics, algorithm design, repository-level software engineering, and structured data extraction, with automatic context caching on the API that slashes repeated prompt costs by over 95%.

In late 2026, DeepSeek remains the price-performance benchmark for developers and automation workflows. While the consumer chat interface remains free without a mandatory $20/month subscription tier, the developer API transitioned in late 2026 to two primary endpoints—`deepseek-flash` and `deepseek-v4-pro`—with time-of-day pricing. Off-peak API calls cost just $0.15 per million input tokens ($0.003 on cache hits) and $0.60 per million output tokens on Flash, and $0.66 input / $1.98 output on V4-Pro, making it a fraction of the cost of comparable Western frontier models.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x).

- **DeepSeek-V4 Hybrid Attention & 1M Context:** Leverages a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture (49B active parameters out of 1.6T on V4-Pro) to process up to 1 million tokens with minimal latency and memory overhead.
- **Transparent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning:** Pioneered by DeepSeek-R1 and integrated into V3.2 and V4 thinking modes, exposing step-by-step self-verification for complex math, logic, and code debugging.
- **Automatic Context Caching & Off-Peak API Pricing:** Drops input token costs to $0.003/1M on Flash and $0.022/1M on V4-Pro for cache hits, with 50% lower rates during off-peak UTC hours.
- **Free Consumer Web & Mobile Assistant:** Provides free access at chat.deepseek.com and on iOS/Android with document uploads, reasoning mode, and web search without paywalling core models.
- **Open-Weight Ecosystem & Self-Hosting Freedom:** Offers open weights for DeepSeek-V3, R1, Distill variants, and Prover models on Hugging Face and GitHub so enterprises can deploy within air-gapped environments.

**Strengths:** Completely free consumer web and mobile app with deep reasoning and web search included; Ultra-low API token rates ($0.15/$0.60 on Flash, $0.66/$1.98 on V4-Pro off-peak) with up to 98% savings on cached inputs; Drop-in OpenAI API compatibility makes switching or routing between models effortless; Strong open-weight lineage allows teams to self-host or fine-tune models without vendor lock-in

**Limitations:** Hosted API and web app store data on servers in China, prompting compliance restrictions for some Western enterprises and government agencies; Peak-hour API pricing (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays) doubles per-token costs compared to off-peak rates; Lacks native voice mode, video generation, and productivity suite integrations offered by ChatGPT and Google Gemini

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Beam and DeepSeek compare in monthly traffic?

Beam has 0 monthly visits, while DeepSeek has 372,761,591. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

Beam has a month-over-month growth rate of -100%; DeepSeek has +4.3%.

### How does pricing compare?

Beam: Paid. One-time, pay-what-you-want purchase for the macOS app with no subscription. You supply your own OpenAI API key and pay OpenAI separately for the tokens you use. The site offers a free trial and a refund policy. DeepSeek: Freemium. Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x).

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [ChatGPT](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4) | 6,048,022,723 | +2.2% | Freemium | Provides stronger multi-modal reasoning and agentic tools, but lacks DeepSeek's ultra-low-cost API pricing. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4.md) |
| 2 | [Google Gemini](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced) | 2,637,398,242 | -0.1% | Freemium | Offers an enormous context window and deep Google ecosystem integration, but feels less specialized for pure reasoning tasks. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced.md) |
| 3 | [Claude](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2) | 1,253,439,413 | +23.8% | Freemium | Delivers superior long-form coding artifacts and nuanced writing, but lacks DeepSeek's specialized open-weight reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2.md) |
| 4 | [Grok](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok) | 203,846,050 | -0.8% | Freemium | Features real-time X social data integration, but is less cost-effective for dedicated developer coding workflows. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok.md) |
| 5 | [Perplexity](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai) | 88,310,223 | -3.7% | Freemium | Real-time AI answer engine and research workspace combining live web citations with frontier reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai.md) |
| 6 | [Qwen 4 (Alibaba Qwen4)](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4) | 35,101,353 | -6.2% | Freemium | Provides comparable open-weight foundation models and multilingual performance, but requires self-hosting or third-party inference setup. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4.md) |
| 7 | [Cursor](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor) | 23,297,751 | +8.4% | Freemium | The AI coding agent for building ambitious software | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor.md) |
| 8 | [Kimi AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat) | 19,632,261 | -23.4% | Free | Excels at ultra-long document analysis and research, but lacks the same level of open-weight developer community support. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat.md) |
| 9 | [Ollama](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama) | 9,421,973 | +4.3% | Free, Freemium, Paid | Enables running open-source models locally on consumer hardware, but lacks DeepSeek's cloud-scale hosted reasoning power. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama.md) |
| 10 | [Chatbot App](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatbot-app) | 2,170,883 | -9.7% | Freemium | Chat with 30+ leading AI models in one clean, fast workspace | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatbot-app.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/beam-vs-deepseek

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