# DeepSeek vs Runner

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Runner records 0 monthly visits with — growth and Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Runner](https://openaitools.app/tool/runner) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://runner.now |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Assistant, AI Productivity Tools, AI Workflow, AI Meeting Assistant |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 0 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | — |
| Primary Market | China | Global |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 0 |
| 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)

## Runner

Runner is an AI agent platform built around a simple idea: instead of one general assistant, run as many agents as you have customers, each one working a case through to completion. The workflow has three steps. You show Runner how your team handles a process; it validates new agents against a simulation built from your past cases until they match your best teammates across dozens of tests; then it deploys an agent per customer in whatever channel they use, such as email, text or phone.

Earlier messaging framed Runner as an AI chief of staff for founders. The current site has broadened that into an end-to-end process platform for sales, support, operations and finance. Instead of drafting a single follow-up email, Runner runs the whole collection process across every delinquent account; instead of reporting sign-ups, it walks every driver applicant through onboarding. The company cites examples like collecting on 500 past-due accounts with a first payment on a three-year-old invoice, and nearly a 5x lift in response rate (2.6% to 12.6%) for a rideshare driver-activation campaign.

Runner emphasizes control and safety: agents stop rather than guess on uncertain cases, sends are capped, most teams approve every message in the early weeks, and every action is recorded. It also lets you bring your own connectors and keeps your playbook, wording and data private, stating it does not train models on your data. You can set it up by adding a plugin inside Claude Code or talk to the team directly.

**Pricing & Plans:** Runner does not publish public pricing. The site offers a product demo and a contact path ("talk to our team") and a quick self-serve setup via a plugin command inside Claude Code, so cost is arranged directly with the vendor based on team size and usage.

- **Train on your own workflows:** Show Runner how your team handles a process, and it turns your past cases into a realistic test that agents must pass before going live.
- **One dedicated agent per customer:** Run as many agents as you have customers, each working 1:1 in the channel the customer uses — email, text or phone.
- **Customer context from public data:** Agents read LinkedIn to learn who a customer is, where they work and what they post, so outreach and follow-ups stay relevant.
- **Broad app and website access:** Connects to your work apps and internal systems, uses any website (even ones most AIs cannot), and reads files or runs code when a job requires it.
- **Human-in-the-loop safety controls:** When something is uncertain the agent stops and flags it for a person, sends are capped, and every action is logged so you can see what happened and when.

**Strengths:** Scales personal attention by giving each customer their own dedicated agent; Trains and validates against your real past cases before deployment; Works across email, text and phone and connects to your existing apps; Strong human-in-the-loop controls, capped sends and full action logging

**Limitations:** Per-seat or per-agent pricing is not published publicly; Requires setup work to define playbooks, tests and connectors; Best value for high-volume, repetitive processes rather than one-off tasks; Newer positioning means fewer public case studies and third-party reviews

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Runner 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%; Runner has —.

### 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). Runner: Contact for Pricing. Runner does not publish public pricing. The site offers a product demo and a contact path ("talk to our team") and a quick self-serve setup via a plugin command inside Claude Code, so cost is arranged directly with the vendor based on team size and usage.

## 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 | [Intercom](https://openaitools.app/tool/intercom-com) | 4,471,110 | +2.7% | Free Trial, Paid | AI-first customer service with a natively integrated AI agent | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/intercom-com.md) |

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

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