# DeepSeek vs Dust

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Dust records 547,217 monthly visits with +1.8% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Dust](https://openaitools.app/tool/dust) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://dust.tt |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Assistant, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Workflow, AI Knowledge Management |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 547,217 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | +1.8% |
| Primary Market | China | France |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 456,919 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.4 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 5 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## 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)

## Dust

Dust positions itself as 'multiplayer AI' for human-agent collaboration. Rather than giving each employee a private chatbot, it lets teams build agents that have shared access to company knowledge, connected tools, conversations and notifications, so work can move back and forth between people and AI. Agents can be reused across departments, and human review stays part of the loop where it matters.

The platform's differentiator is context. According to Dust, most AI tools can retrieve a single Slack message or CRM record, whereas its agents pull context together across Slack, CRM, documents and other company systems to answer with the full picture and then act on it. Over 70 connectors cover messaging, calendars, CRM, file storage, project management, data and finance tools, and agents can reach MCP servers through the same gateway.

Governance is a first-class feature. Dust offers a dual-layer permission model that separates what agents can access from who can use them, SCIM-synced groups, admin-gated overrides, audit logs and analytics for monitoring adoption, usage, cost and ROI. It is SOC 2 Type II certified, offers US or EU data residency and supports single-tenant deployment. Teams can build agents with 20+ frontier and open-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and others, choosing the right model per workflow. The company says more than 3,000 organizations and 300,000+ agents run on the platform.

**Pricing & Plans:** Contact for pricing. Dust offers a free trial after signup, but its plans are oriented toward teams and enterprises with usage-based credits, volume pricing and dedicated support; you need to talk to sales for exact figures.

- **Agents with company context:** Connect 70+ tools including Slack, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce and Zendesk so agents answer with real company knowledge instead of generic guesses.
- **70+ connectors and MCP support:** Reach messaging, CRM, docs, project management, data, finance and MCP servers through one platform, so agents can act across systems rather than just chat.
- **Model flexibility:** Build agents with 20+ frontier and open-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral, and pick the best model for each task.
- **AI-native governance:** A dual-layer permission model, SCIM-synced groups, admin-gated overrides, audit logs and usage analytics keep company data locked down while teams move fast.
- **Multiplayer collaboration:** People and agents share context, tools and notifications, so cross-functional workflows run with reusable skills and human review built in.

**Strengths:** Deep context gathering across 70+ enterprise connectors; Strong enterprise governance with permissions, audit logs and SOC 2 Type II; Model-agnostic: choose among 20+ frontier and open-source models; Shared, reusable agents that scale across departments

**Limitations:** Pricing is sales-led, so costs are hard to estimate before a demo; Setting up connectors and permissions takes real admin work; Best value comes with broad rollout, which is a heavier commitment for small teams

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Dust has 547,217. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

DeepSeek has a month-over-month growth rate of +4.3%; Dust has +1.8%.

### How does pricing compare?

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). Dust: Contact for Pricing. Contact for pricing. Dust offers a free trial after signup, but its plans are oriented toward teams and enterprises with usage-based credits, volume pricing and dedicated support; you need to talk to sales for exact figures.

## 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 | [Notion](https://openaitools.app/tool/t) | 173,441,670 | +0.1% | Freemium | Provides a unified connected workspace for team documents and databases, but lacks Dust's advanced multi-source enterprise knowledge indexing. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/t.md) |
| 6 | [Salesforce Agentforce (formerly Einstein)](https://openaitools.app/tool/salesforce-einstein) | 111,910,743 | +2.2% | Freemium | Integrates deeply with CRM ecosystems to automate enterprise workflows, but is tightly bound to the Salesforce software suite. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/salesforce-einstein.md) |
| 7 | [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) |
| 8 | [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) |
| 9 | [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) |
| 10 | [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) |

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

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