How do their growth rates compare?

DeepSeek has a month-over-month growth rate of +4.3%; Merge has -7.6%.

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). Merge: Freemium, Contact for Pricing. Freemium with contract-based tiers. The Launch plan includes 3 production Linked Accounts free, then $650/month for up to 10 Linked Accounts with $65 per additional account and volume discounts. Professional and Enterprise plans are contract-based with custom fields, field-level scopes, custom sync frequencies, enterprise security, SLAs, and premium support.

What are alternatives to DeepSeek and Merge?

Other tools in related categories include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, OpenAI Platform, Google AI Studio.

DeepSeek vs Merge — Traffic (372.76M vs 307.85K), Pricing & Verdict

Open AI Tools

DeepSeek vs Merge — Traffic (372.76M vs 307.85K), Pricing & Verdict | Open AI Tools

Side-by-Side Traffic & Specification Matrix

Dimension / Metric	DeepSeek	Merge
Official Domain	deepseek.com	merge.dev
Pricing Model	Freemium	Freemium, Contact for Pricing
Monthly Visits	372.76M (372,761,591)	307.85K (307,846)
MoM Traffic Delta	+15.36M (+4.3%)	-25.35K (-7.6%)
Primary Market & Share	🇨🇳 China (50.5%)	🇺🇸 United States (27.6%)
Direct Visits / mo	291.59M	118.26K
User Rating	3.8	5
Supported Platforms	Website	Website

DeepSeek

High-efficiency open-weight and hosted reasoning AI powered by DeepSeek-V4 and R1 at ultra-low token costs.

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.

Strengths & Pros

+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