# DeepSeek vs Museum of Models (Rival)

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Museum of Models (Rival) records 9,187 monthly visits with -35% growth and Free pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Museum of Models (Rival)](https://openaitools.app/tool/rival) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://rival.tips |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Models, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Tools Directory |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 9,187 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -35% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 3,663 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.4 |
| 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)

## Museum of Models (Rival)

Museum of Models — the project formerly known as Rival — is a free, ad-free archive of how AI models actually answer. Since May 2024, the same 100 questions have been put to every model in the exact same way, once, and every answer has been kept exactly as it was given, including the odd ones and the empty ones. The result is 18,773 answers from 385 models, a record of how each one drew a pelican, built a landing page, told five jokes, or named a favourite city.

The premise is that leaderboards only remember scores. When a lab retires a model and switches it off, its weights often disappear and nobody can ask it anything again. The museum keeps the outputs themselves: 121 of the 385 models featured are no longer served on OpenRouter, yet their drawings, websites, writing and image answers are still here to browse.

Nothing on the site is ranked or scored, and supporting it changes nothing about what it shows. Answers are presented in their native form — drawings as SVG, websites running live in a sandbox, images as pictures, writing as readable pages and voices you can play. Visitors can spin an interactive globe of answers, compare two to four models side by side, sort by release date, lab or question, and step back through a monthly timeline of the museum since it opened. The full collection is downloadable and reusable under CC BY 4.0 with credit.

**Pricing & Plans:** The museum is completely free with no ads. Hosting costs are covered by voluntary donations, such as buying the creator a coffee, and all answer data can be downloaded and reused under CC BY 4.0 with credit.

- **18,773 answers from 385 models:** One hundred identical questions covering drawings, websites, writing, images, code and audio, each answered by every model and kept as given.
- **Retired models preserved:** 121 of the 385 models are no longer served on OpenRouter, yet their answers remain viewable, preserving outputs that would otherwise be lost.
- **Side-by-side comparison:** Add two to four models with a single click and view their answers to the same questions next to each other.
- **Interactive globe and index:** Explore a magnifiable globe of answers, an index sortable by release date, lab or question, a monthly timeline, and a fast command-K search.
- **Live, runnable exhibits:** Generated websites run live in a sandbox, drawings are the model's own SVG, images are shown at 640px, and voices can be played directly.

**Strengths:** Completely free and ad-free, with no login required; Preserves answers from models that have since been retired and switched off; Methodologically consistent: identical prompts, one attempt, documented settings; Open data downloadable under CC BY 4.0 and explorable through globe, index and side-by-side views

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and Museum of Models (Rival) compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Museum of Models (Rival) has 9,187. 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%; Museum of Models (Rival) has -35%.

### 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). Museum of Models (Rival): Free. The museum is completely free with no ads. Hosting costs are covered by voluntary donations, such as buying the creator a coffee, and all answer data can be downloaded and reused under CC BY 4.0 with credit.

## 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 | [PromptHero](https://openaitools.app/tool/prompthero) | 1,044,654 | -2.4% | Freemium | Search millions of AI prompts and generate images and videos with every major model | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/prompthero.md) |

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

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