# DeepSeek vs SciFig

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. SciFig records 91,473 monthly visits with +4.7% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [SciFig](https://openaitools.app/tool/scifig) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://scifig.ai |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Image Generator, AI Background Remover, AI Image Enhancer, AI Image Upscaler |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 91,473 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | +4.7% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 23,551 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.1 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 1 |
| 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)

## SciFig

SciFig is built around the observation that most papers need more than one kind of figure, and that juggling several unrelated tools for illustrations, plots and diagrams wastes time. Its Illustration workspace accepts six input modes: a written description, a rough sketch, a lab photo, a PDF of an existing paper, a reference figure to imitate in style, and photo-to-figure conversion. From any of these it produces scientific images of mechanisms, pathways, cross-sections and graphical abstracts, drawing on hundreds of templates across multiple disciplines.

The DataChart workspace is the quantitative side. Upload a CSV or Excel file, describe the chart you want, and SciFig plots it in journal-consistent styles with colorblind-safe palettes. The chart library is deliberately deep and organized by research need — basic and trend charts, distribution and statistics plots such as violin, box and raincloud charts, relationship and model plots like regression and Bland–Altman, biomedical staples including volcano plots and Kaplan–Meier survival curves, plus flows and structures such as heatmaps and Sankey diagrams. Charts ship with the statistics and the Python code that produced them, which matters when a reviewer asks how a figure was made.

FlowChart covers the qualitative diagrams: PRISMA and CONSORT screening flows, model architectures, cycle diagrams and research timelines, described in plain language and returned as editable diagrams rather than static images. Across all three engines the editability is the real differentiator — you can retype a label, redraw one region, switch journal style or palette, or move a box and its arrows without regenerating the whole figure. Export options include editable PPTX, layered SVG, 8K PNG/JPG, and for data charts also PDF, EPS and TIFF, so figures survive poster, manuscript and presentation formats alike.

**Pricing & Plans:** Freemium. New users start with up to 150 free credits and can reach about 250 free credits on day one when joining through an invite, with no credit card required. Paid plans and credit packs are available, and the site states paid credits never expire. Pricing changes with promotions, so check the pricing page for current plan details.

- **Three dedicated engines: Illustration, DataChart and FlowCha:** Three dedicated engines: Illustration, DataChart and FlowChart for scientific images, data plots and protocol diagrams respectively
- **Six illustration input modes: text, sketch, photo, PDF, refe:** Six illustration input modes: text, sketch, photo, PDF, reference figure and photo enhancement, backed by hundreds of discipline-specific templates
- **Data charts straight from CSV or Excel across around 50 char:** Data charts straight from CSV or Excel across around 50 chart types, including volcano plots, survival curves, forest plots and heatmaps
- **Fully editable output: change any label, recolor, redraw a r:** Fully editable output: change any label, recolor, redraw a region or shift a box and its arrows without regenerating the figure
- **Researcher-friendly export: layered SVG, editable PPTX, 8K P:** Researcher-friendly export: layered SVG, editable PPTX, 8K PNG/JPG, plus PDF, EPS and TIFF for charts, with journal styles and colorblind-safe palettes

**Strengths:** Purpose-built for research figures rather than generic AI image generation, with journal styles and colorblind-safe palettes; Strong editability after generation, so a figure can be refined instead of regenerated from scratch; Data charts are plotted from your actual numbers and come with the statistics and Python code; Wide export coverage including layered SVG, editable PPTX and print-grade TIFF/EPS

**Limitations:** Scientific accuracy still depends on your input: descriptions and extracted text must be checked before publication; Credit-based pricing means heavy figure production can consume the allowance quickly; The enormous tool and template catalog can feel overwhelming for a first-time user

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while SciFig has 91,473. 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%; SciFig has +4.7%.

### 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). SciFig: Freemium. Freemium. New users start with up to 150 free credits and can reach about 250 free credits on day one when joining through an invite, with no credit card required. Paid plans and credit packs are available, and the site states paid credits never expire. Pricing changes with promotions, so check the pricing page for current plan details.

## 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-scifig

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