# DeepSeek vs MaxKB

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. MaxKB records 169 monthly visits with -95.1% growth and Free, Paid (self-hosted subscription) pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [MaxKB](https://openaitools.app/tool/maxkb) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://maxkb.pro |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Assistant, AI Chatbot, Open Source AI Models, AI Agent |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free, Paid (self-hosted subscription) |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 169 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -95.1% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 67 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.6 |
| 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)

## MaxKB

MaxKB, short for Max Knowledge Brain, is an open-source platform aimed squarely at enterprises that want to deploy AI assistants on their own infrastructure. At its core is a complete Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline: you upload documents or point the system at online sources, and MaxKB handles text splitting, vectorization, and retrieval so that answers are grounded in your own content rather than the model's raw memory. This grounding is what keeps hallucination rates down and makes the assistant usable for regulated or accuracy-sensitive work.

Beyond retrieval, MaxKB ships an agentic workflow engine with a function library and MCP tool-use. Teams can orchestrate multi-step AI processes, wire in external APIs, and connect the assistant to third-party business systems with zero coding, giving existing applications smart Q&A capabilities quickly. The platform is model-agnostic, supporting private deployments of DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen and similar open models alongside public APIs like OpenAI, Claude and Gemini, so you can mix and match per use case.

The project is free in its OSS edition and can be self-hosted without limits on usage, with a commercial Pro edition adding unlimited users, applications and knowledge bases plus single sign-on and email support. It is widely deployed for intelligent customer service, corporate knowledge bases, academic research, and education.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free OSS Edition for self-hosting (up to 2 users, 5 applications, 50 knowledge bases). Pro Edition is an annual self-hosted subscription with unlimited users, applications and knowledge bases plus SSO and email support. Trial licenses are available on request; billing is annual only and does not auto-renew.

- **RAG pipeline:** Upload documents or crawl web sources with automatic text splitting, vectorization, and retrieval to ground answers in your own knowledge.
- **Agentic workflow engine:** Orchestrate multi-step AI processes with a function library and MCP tool-use for complex business logic.
- **Model-agnostic LLM support:** Connect private models such as DeepSeek, Llama and Qwen or public APIs including OpenAI, Claude and Gemini.
- **Zero-code system integration:** Embed intelligent Q&A into existing business systems and third-party apps without writing code.
- **Self-hosted and extensible:** Deploy entirely on your own infrastructure with open-source code, custom embedding models, and enterprise SSO options.

**Strengths:** Fully open-source and self-hostable, so sensitive data never has to leave your infrastructure; Combines RAG, workflows, and MCP tool-use in one platform instead of stitching tools together; Model-agnostic design lets you use private open-weight models or commercial APIs; Generous free OSS edition with no usage limits for smaller teams

**Limitations:** No SaaS option — you must host and maintain it yourself; Advanced features such as SSO and unlimited seats require the paid Pro Edition; Billing is annual only, with no monthly plan

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while MaxKB has 169. 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%; MaxKB has -95.1%.

### 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). MaxKB: Free, Paid (self-hosted subscription). Free OSS Edition for self-hosting (up to 2 users, 5 applications, 50 knowledge bases). Pro Edition is an annual self-hosted subscription with unlimited users, applications and knowledge bases plus SSO and email support. Trial licenses are available on request; billing is annual only and does not auto-renew.

## 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 | The AI workspace where teams and agents get work done together | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/t.md) |
| 6 | [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) |
| 7 | [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) |
| 8 | [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) |
| 9 | [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) |
| 10 | [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) |

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

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