# DeepSeek vs Rayo (Zero by Rayo)

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Rayo (Zero by Rayo) records 0 monthly visits with -100% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Rayo (Zero by Rayo)](https://openaitools.app/tool/rayo) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://rayo.work |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI SEO Tools, SEO Writing AI, AI Blog Generator, AI Bypasser |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 0 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -100% |
| Primary Market | China | Global |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 0 |
| 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)

## Rayo (Zero by Rayo)

Rayo is an AI assistant company that has repositioned around a product called Zero. Zero is described as an always-on assistant that runs the work you would otherwise hand off to a person: it can read your inbox, find new leads, draft a summary, and email it on a schedule, then ask for confirmation when it is unsure about an action. The pitch is less about chatting and more about a dependable agent that quietly completes recurring jobs in the background.

The product is currently in a pre-launch, waitlist-driven phase, and the site shows a countdown plus logos of teams that have joined the queue. Access to strong underlying models is part of the value proposition, along with auditability and a privacy-first design. Detailed feature documentation is not yet public at this stage.

Rayo also keeps a legacy SEO automation product live for its existing user base, which is a useful reminder that the company has shipped before and is now betting its next chapter on agentic assistants. Because pricing has not been published, teams interested in Zero should expect to learn commercial terms through the waitlist process.

**Pricing & Plans:** No public pricing is listed yet — Rayo is in a waitlist/pre-launch phase, so commercial terms are expected to be shared with early-access participants.

- **Always-on scheduled agents:** Zero runs tasks on triggers and time schedules — for example, reading new leads every morning at 9am and emailing a summary.
- **Multi-step task execution:** The assistant chains actions such as reading an inbox, identifying leads, drafting an email, and sending it, rather than producing a single answer.
- **Confirmation when unsure:** When an action is ambiguous, Zero pauses and asks before doing something irreversible, such as emailing a specific contact.
- **Access to strong models:** Rayo markets frictionless access to capable frontier models as part of the assistant's core value.
- **Auditability and privacy:** The product emphasizes a fully auditable action log and privacy-first handling of the data it touches.

**Strengths:** Positioned around dependable, scheduled execution rather than one-off chat answers; Confirmation steps reduce the risk of an agent taking the wrong irreversible action; Markets access to high-capability models plus auditability and privacy; Backed by a company with a shipped legacy product, not a brand-new unknown

**Limitations:** Still gated behind a waitlist, so hands-on evaluation is not yet possible; No published pricing or detailed feature documentation at this stage

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and Rayo (Zero by Rayo) compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Rayo (Zero by Rayo) has 0. 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%; Rayo (Zero by Rayo) has -100%.

### 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). Rayo (Zero by Rayo): Contact for Pricing. No public pricing is listed yet — Rayo is in a waitlist/pre-launch phase, so commercial terms are expected to be shared with early-access participants.

## 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 | [Dify](https://openaitools.app/tool/dify-ai) | 819,691 | -15% | Freemium | Build, deploy, and govern production-ready agentic AI workflows | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/dify-ai.md) |

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

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