# DeepSeek vs Locus

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Locus records 615 monthly visits with -85.1% growth and Freemium, Free Trial pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Locus](https://openaitools.app/tool/locus) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://locusextension.com |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Copilot, AI Research Tool, AI Summarizer, AI Search Engine |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium, Free Trial |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 615 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -85.1% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 239 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.1 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 3 |
| 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)

## Locus

Locus reframes the browser search box around intent rather than exact text. Regular Ctrl+F only finds the words you already know; Locus uses natural-language processing so you can ask for a concept, a section, or an answer and be taken straight to the matching part of a page or PDF. This makes it particularly useful for long papers, dense textbooks, and news articles where you know what you want to learn but not the phrasing used on the page.

Beyond finding text, Locus layers AI assistance on top of what you read. Its AI helpers summarize pages or passages, generate note cards for study, and suggest follow-up research topics, drawing on current large language models such as OpenAI GPT-4o and 4o mini, Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku, and Google Gemini 1.5 Flash. You can also bring your own OpenAI API key to unlock unlimited usage.

Locus is built as a lightweight browser extension with a companion dashboard. A generous free tier covers personal reading and research, while a Professional plan removes document and action limits for heavier users. Reviews from students, analysts, and research assistants highlight its value in quickly narrowing long-form content down to the parts worth reading.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free plan at $0 forever with daily document and AI-action limits; Professional plan at $7.50/month billed annually ($90) or $9/month with advanced AI models, faster processing, and no document limits, including a free trial.

- **Natural-language smart search:** Use everyday language to find the exact section you need on any web page or PDF, catching matches that exact keyword search cannot.
- **AI summarization:** Summarize entire pages or selected portions to save time and get the key takeaway quickly.
- **Research and study helpers:** Locus AI helpers brainstorm research topics, suggest further reading, and generate note cards to help you retain information.
- **Multiple LLM backends:** Choose from current models including OpenAI GPT-4o-family options, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini, with new releases added within days.
- **Favorites and search history:** Save key search answers and passages to favorites so you can return to them across long papers and documents.

**Strengths:** Makes long PDFs and web articles searchable by meaning, not just keywords; Combines search, summarization, and study tools in one extension; Free tier is genuinely usable for personal research; Supports multiple leading LLM providers and bring-your-own API key

**Limitations:** Free plan caps searches and AI actions per day; Advanced models and no-limit usage sit behind the paid tier; Some AI features require bringing your own OpenAI API key for unlimited use

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Locus has 615. 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%; Locus has -85.1%.

### 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). Locus: Freemium, Free Trial. Free plan at $0 forever with daily document and AI-action limits; Professional plan at $7.50/month billed annually ($90) or $9/month with advanced AI models, faster processing, and no document limits, including a free trial.

## 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-locus

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