# DeepSeek vs sidellama

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. sidellama records 0 monthly visits with — growth and Free pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [sidellama](https://openaitools.app/tool/sidellama) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sidellama/lcgkoaonfgonjamccahahodpkdkfhijo |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI Assistant, AI Chatbot |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free |
| 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 | 4.3 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 0 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Browser Extension |

## 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)

## sidellama

sidellama is a small Chrome extension that turns your browser into a chat client for open-source language models. Rather than locking you into one provider, it connects to whatever model access you already have: a local Ollama server, a local LM Studio server, or open-source models hosted through Groq. The extension itself is lightweight (under a megabyte) and open source, with the code published on GitHub.

What makes it browser-augmented is page context. When you are reading an article or documentation, you can feed the visible text of that page into the conversation, or switch to HTML mode to share the page source — a developer-oriented option that is intentionally resource intensive and paired with a character limit so you do not blow past your context window. Web search augmentation adds live public data: type a query, choose DuckDuckGo or Brave as the source, and sidellama runs an asynchronous search to ground its answer.

A persona system lets you build and modify your own assistants. You can create, configure, and switch between different system prompts and custom instructions, so the same model can act as a coding helper, a summarizer, or a research companion depending on the persona you select. The listing shows version 0.0.1, last updated August 29, 2024, with a small but strongly positive rating base and no data collection declared by the developer.

**Pricing & Plans:** sidellama is free. There is no charge for the extension itself; you cover the cost of whichever model access you connect, such as your own local Ollama or LM Studio setup or a paid/limited Groq API tier.

- **Connect local or hosted open-source models:** Point sidellama at a local Ollama or LM Studio server, or use open-source models through Groq.
- **Page context augmentation:** Share the text of the page you are reading, or its HTML source in development mode, with a configurable character limit.
- **Custom personas:** Create and modify personal assistants with system prompts and custom instructions for different tasks.
- **Web search augmentation:** Run asynchronous searches through DuckDuckGo or Brave and answer questions using live public data.
- **Open-source codebase:** The extension is open source, with the code available in a public GitHub repository.

**Strengths:** Free and open source, with code on GitHub; Works with local Ollama and LM Studio servers for private use; Page context and web search grounding in one small extension; Custom personas via system prompts and custom instructions

**Limitations:** Last updated August 2024; feature set is intentionally minimal; Very small user base and only a couple of ratings; Web search augmentation is basic, not a full research pipeline; HTML mode is resource intensive and intended for development only

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while sidellama 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%; sidellama 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). sidellama: Free. sidellama is free. There is no charge for the extension itself; you cover the cost of whichever model access you connect, such as your own local Ollama or LM Studio setup or a paid/limited Groq API tier.

## 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 | Run and build with open AI models locally or in the cloud | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama.md) |
| 10 | [Poe](https://openaitools.app/tool/poe) | 5,894,702 | +9.1% | Freemium | One app to chat with GPT, Claude, Gemini and hundreds of other AI models | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/poe.md) |

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

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