# DeepSeek vs Play (formerly spring.new)

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Play (formerly spring.new) records 0 monthly visits with 0% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Play (formerly spring.new)](https://openaitools.app/tool/spring-new) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://spring.new |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI App Builder, AI Website Builder |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 0 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | 0% |
| Primary Market | China | Global |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 0 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.2 |
| 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)

## Play (formerly spring.new)

Play is an AI-native workspace designed so teams can build, automate, and deploy AI co-workers without engineering bottlenecks. It brings spreadsheets, dashboards, project views, and team communication into one connected surface, letting you adapt your tools to how your team actually works instead of stitching together disconnected apps.

Central to Play are AI co-workers that learn your processes and handle tasks autonomously, paired with a fast real-time collaborative environment. Out of the box you get templates for finance, sales, product, marketing, HR, customer success, operations, and engineering — including a keyboard-first spreadsheet (Insight), a CSV/JSON-to-dashboard builder (Prism), a CRM command center (Winning), a work OS with table, kanban, gantt, calendar, form, and dashboard views (Clarity), and a team communication surface (Communicate).

Play connects to the tools you already use, including Gmail, Notion, Airtable, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, and Linear, with permissions and security built in. The site offers a free tier and enterprise options, so teams can start free and scale with governance as needed.

**Pricing & Plans:** Play offers a free plan to get started plus paid and enterprise tiers; exact pricing is listed on its pricing page and enterprise terms are handled through a demo.

- **AI co-workers:** Deploy intelligent AI co-workers that learn your processes and handle tasks autonomously inside your workspace.
- **No-code app builder:** Build tailored internal software and automation workflows from templates instead of waiting on engineering.
- **Unified work surface:** Spreadsheets, dashboards, task views, and team communication live in one connected, real-time collaborative workspace.
- **Ready-made templates:** Start from templates for finance, sales, product, marketing, HR, support, operations, and engineering workflows.
- **Integrations with your stack:** Connect Gmail, Notion, Airtable, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Linear, and more with built-in permissions and security.

**Strengths:** Combines spreadsheets, dashboards, tasks, and chat in one workspace to reduce tool sprawl; AI co-workers and templates let non-engineers build working automations quickly; Integrations with common CRMs, ticketing, and docs tools plus enterprise controls

**Limitations:** Rebranded from spring.new, so existing links and docs may be confusing; Broad feature set can be overwhelming for very small teams

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/spring-new.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and Play (formerly spring.new) compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Play (formerly spring.new) 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%; Play (formerly spring.new) has 0%.

### 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). Play (formerly spring.new): Freemium. Play offers a free plan to get started plus paid and enterprise tiers; exact pricing is listed on its pricing page and enterprise terms are handled through a demo.

## 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 | [Lovable](https://openaitools.app/tool/lovable) | 31,052,090 | +3.8% | Freemium | Describe your idea in chat and Lovable turns it into a working app or website | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/lovable.md) |
| 8 | [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) |
| 9 | [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) |
| 10 | [Base44](https://openaitools.app/tool/base44) | 14,039,232 | +0.5% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Build working apps, websites, and AI agents by describing them | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/base44.md) |

---
Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/deepseek-vs-spring-new

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