# DeepSeek vs UseChat (now 88Agents)

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. UseChat (now 88Agents) records 0 monthly visits with 0% growth and Free Trial, Paid pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [UseChat (now 88Agents)](https://openaitools.app/tool/usechat) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://usechat.ai |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Chatbot, AI Customer Service, AI Assistant, Large Language Models (LLMs) |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free Trial, Paid |
| 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 | 4.1 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 5 |
| 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)

## UseChat (now 88Agents)

UseChat redirects to 88Agents, the current name of the product. It is a chatbot and agent-building platform aimed at agencies and internal product teams rather than one-off website widgets. The pitch is deliberately unglamorous: you start with a smart chatbot that answers questions, knows your client's documentation and captures leads, and you scale the same assistant into an agent that can query databases, trigger workflows and call external APIs when the project demands it.

Model choice is a first-class feature rather than a hidden default. You can switch between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini models without changing code, which matters when you are managing cost and capability across many client accounts. Knowledge ingestion covers PDFs, Word and Markdown files, full website crawls, structured CSV/JSON datasets, YouTube videos and playlists for automatic transcript extraction, and FAQ pairs for exact-match answers. Everything is indexed and searchable from the same configuration.

Deployment is multi-channel from a single setup. The same knowledge base and personality can appear as an embeddable chat widget styled to match a client's brand, as a Slack app handling DMs and channel mentions, or as an email agent reading and replying over IMAP/SMTP on a schedule. Every conversation is logged and searchable, and contacts can be collected when you want to turn conversations into leads. Pricing starts around $29/month and scales to $399/month, with annual billing offering a discount, plus an enterprise tier.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free to start with no credit card required; paid plans listed on the site are Starter at $29/month (25 chatbots, 1 GB storage, unlimited chats, 5 team members, 3 channels), Pro at $99/month (100 chatbots, 10 GB storage, 25 team members, 5 channels, 1 year history) and Expert at $399/month (250 chatbots, 100 GB storage, 100 team members, 10 channels, 2 years history). Yearly billing saves roughly 30%, and a custom Enterprise plan is available. You supply your own model API keys.

- **Bring your own keys and models:** Connect OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini and switch models in seconds without changing code, so you are never locked to a single provider and can optimize cost as pricing changes.
- **Multi-channel deployment:** Publish one chatbot configuration to an embeddable website widget, Slack workspaces (DMs and channel mentions) and an email agent that reads and answers over IMAP/SMTP — same knowledge, same personality.
- **Broad knowledge ingestion:** Train on PDFs, Word and Markdown documents, full website crawls or specific pages, structured CSV/JSON datasets, YouTube videos and playlists with automatic transcripts, and FAQ pairs for exact answers.
- **Chatbot to agent in one platform:** Start with a simple Q&A chatbot and extend it into an agent that can query databases, kick off workflows and call external APIs without migrating to another tool.
- **Conversation visibility and contacts:** Every message is logged and searchable, scheduled site syncs keep content fresh, and contact capture turns visitor conversations into follow-up leads.

**Strengths:** Own your API keys and pick between OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini per project; One configuration deploys to web, Slack and email, which suits multi-client agency work; Ingestion covers documents, site crawls, datasets, YouTube transcripts and FAQs; Transparent published pricing with a free tier and no credit card required

**Limitations:** Pricing tiers cap chatbots, channels and team members per plan, which can add up across many client accounts; Bring-your-own-key model means you also carry the underlying LLM usage costs; The email channel depends on you configuring IMAP/SMTP access for each client

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and UseChat (now 88Agents) compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while UseChat (now 88Agents) 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%; UseChat (now 88Agents) 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). UseChat (now 88Agents): Free Trial, Paid. Free to start with no credit card required; paid plans listed on the site are Starter at $29/month (25 chatbots, 1 GB storage, unlimited chats, 5 team members, 3 channels), Pro at $99/month (100 chatbots, 10 GB storage, 25 team members, 5 channels, 1 year history) and Expert at $399/month (250 chatbots, 100 GB storage, 100 team members, 10 channels, 2 years history). Yearly billing saves roughly 30%, and a custom Enterprise plan is available. You supply your own model API keys.

## 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 | [Chatbot App](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatbot-app) | 2,170,883 | -9.7% | Freemium | Chat with 30+ leading AI models in one clean, fast workspace | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatbot-app.md) |

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

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