How do their growth rates compare?

DeepSeek has a month-over-month growth rate of +4.3%; Refraction has -59.4%.

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). Refraction: Freemium, Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing, Free. Freemium with a 7-day free trial on paid plans. Hobby is free (one user, 10 code generations). Pro costs $8/month or $80/year for one user with unlimited generations, unlimited history and editor extensions. Team is $14 per user per month or $140 per user per year and adds shared history, unified billing and team management. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes SSO, SCIM, advanced permissions, audit logs and dedicated support. Yearly billing saves 15% and no refunds are offered, though you can cancel anytime.

What are alternatives to DeepSeek and Refraction?

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

DeepSeek vs Refraction — Traffic (372.76M vs 2.24K), Pricing & Verdict

Open AI Tools

DeepSeek vs Refraction — Traffic (372.76M vs 2.24K), Pricing & Verdict | Open AI Tools

Side-by-Side Traffic & Specification Matrix

Dimension / Metric	DeepSeek	$Refraction logo$ Refraction
Official Domain	deepseek.com	refraction.dev
Pricing Model	Freemium	Freemium, Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing, Free
Monthly Visits	372.76M (372,761,591)	2.24K (2,237)
MoM Traffic Delta	+15.36M (+4.3%)	-3.28K (-59.4%)
Primary Market & Share	🇨🇳 China (50.5%)	🇮🇳 India (77.6%)
Direct Visits / mo	291.59M	867
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