# DeepSeek vs Elicit

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Elicit records 1,751,507 monthly visits with +3.1% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Elicit](https://openaitools.app/tool/elicit) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://elicit.com |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Research Tool, AI Assistant, AI Summarizer |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 1,751,507 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | +3.1% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 849,665 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.6 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 24 |
| 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)

## Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant built for scientific and evidence-heavy work. Instead of returning a single chat answer, it searches academic literature and clinical trial registries, then produces structured artifacts — reports, comparison tables, figures, calculations and slides — where each claim carries sentence-level citations to the underlying source.

The product spans several workflows. A research agent handles high-stakes questions by gathering evidence across scientific databases, public data sources and internally uploaded documents. Semantic search makes it possible to find relevant papers without knowing the exact keywords, and research reports follow a process inspired by systematic reviews, with the ability to change which papers and data points are included. For systematic literature reviews, Elicit automates screening and data extraction, with users reporting up to 80% time savings.

Additional features support longer research programs: a Library stores and organizes sources for reuse, Routines monitor new evidence so ongoing work stays current, and a shared research hub lets people and AI agents work from the same evidence. Teams in pharma, academia, medical devices, policy, consumer goods and industrials use Elicit, and pricing combines a free tier with paid plans.

**Pricing & Plans:** Elicit offers a free tier plus paid individual and team plans; the site references pricing tiers for individuals, professionals and organizations, so check the pricing page for current rates.

- **Research agent:** A research agent gathers evidence across scientific databases, journals, public data and your own uploads, then produces cited reports, tables, figures and slides.
- **Semantic literature search:** Semantic search across more than 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials, without needing exact keywords.
- **Customizable research reports:** High-quality research briefs inspired by systematic review methodology, with deep customization of which papers and data are included.
- **Systematic review automation:** Automated screening and data extraction for systematic reviews, with researchers reporting up to 80% time savings.
- **Library and Routines:** Store sources in a library for reuse, and set Routines so new evidence keeps your work current.

**Strengths:** Sentence-level citations make claims traceable; Handles large-scale reviews, up to 1,000 papers and 20,000 data points; Automates the tedious screening and extraction steps of systematic reviews; Combines external literature with your own uploaded documents

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Elicit has 1,751,507. 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%; Elicit has +3.1%.

### 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). Elicit: Freemium. Elicit offers a free tier plus paid individual and team plans; the site references pricing tiers for individuals, professionals and organizations, so check the pricing page for current rates.

## 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 | [Semantic Scholar](https://openaitools.app/tool/semantic-scholar) | 8,198,672 | +5.8% | Free | Completely free access to a massive scientific literature index, but lacks deep conversational AI synthesis features. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/semantic-scholar.md) |

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

More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)