# DeepSeek vs ExplainThis

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. ExplainThis records 1,463 monthly visits with -54% growth and Free pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [ExplainThis](https://openaitools.app/tool/explainthis) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://explainthis.ai |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Assistant, AI Productivity Tools, AI Marketing, AI Sales |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 1,463 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -54% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 428 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 3.9 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 0 |
| 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)

## ExplainThis

ExplainThis is an AI assistant aimed squarely at people who read for a living. It is distributed mainly as a Chrome extension, so instead of copying text into a separate tool you can summarise and explain a page right where you found it. That low-friction placement is the point: the tool is meant to slot into an existing browsing habit rather than demand a new workflow.

Its core jobs are summarisation and explanation. Long articles can be distilled into the essentials, and YouTube videos can be turned into the key points without watching start to finish. For startup knowledge workers — founders, marketers, salespeople and product managers — that means faster grounding when researching a market, a competitor or a topic that just came up in a meeting.

The product fits a category of lightweight AI copilots that augment browsing rather than replace it. It will not do your thinking for you, and summaries should still be checked against the source for anything high-stakes, but it removes a meaningful amount of reading overhead from the day. Check the official site for the current feature set and plan limits, since AI assistant products in this space evolve quickly.

**Pricing & Plans:** ExplainThis is generally offered as a free-to-start AI assistant with paid options for heavier usage. Review the official site for current pricing, as details may change.

- **Page and article summarisation:** Turn long articles and pages into a readable summary so you can decide what deserves a full read.
- **Video explanation:** Get the key takeaways from YouTube videos without sitting through the entire runtime.
- **Browser extension workflow:** Primarily a Chrome extension, so it sits alongside whatever you are already browsing rather than forcing a separate app.
- **Built for fast-moving teams:** Built for startup knowledge workers who need context fast across marketing, sales and product research.
- **Explanations on demand:** Ask follow-up questions about the content you are viewing to dig into the parts that matter to you.

**Strengths:** Sits inside the browser as a Chrome extension, so there is nothing new to launch; Handles both web pages and YouTube videos; Speeds up research for founders, marketers and product teams; Useful for triaging which long articles actually deserve a full read

**Limitations:** Relies on a browser extension, so it is most useful inside desktop Chrome; Summary quality depends on how well the page is structured; You need to review AI output before acting on it for anything important; Best experience requires signing in, which some users prefer to avoid

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while ExplainThis has 1,463. 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%; ExplainThis has -54%.

### 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). ExplainThis: Free. ExplainThis is generally offered as a free-to-start AI assistant with paid options for heavier usage. Review the official site for current pricing, as details may change.

## 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 | [Monica](https://openaitools.app/tool/monica-ai) | 4,512,775 | -11.3% | Freemium | All-in-one AI assistant across web, browser, desktop and mobile | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/monica-ai.md) |

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

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