# DeepSeek vs Windmill (Windy)

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Windmill (Windy) records 24,480 monthly visits with +20.6% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Windmill (Windy)](https://openaitools.app/tool/windy) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://gowindmill.com |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Assistant, AI Copilot, AI Productivity Tools, AI Chatbot |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 24,480 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | +20.6% |
| Primary Market | China | United States |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 9,984 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.4 |
| 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)

## Windmill (Windy)

Windmill takes aim at the part of performance management everyone dreads: reconstructing six months of work at review time. Rather than asking managers to remember, it builds an evidence trail continuously. Windy reaches out in Slack after someone joins, asks peers how a finished project went, and pulls the week's real activities into a ready-made 1:1 agenda, so the conversation starts from facts instead of awkward silence.

At the end of a cycle, the platform drafts the review itself. A rating comes with the underlying evidence items and peer reviews attached, which means managers review the evidence rather than rebuild the quarter from memory, and employees get a reminder of their own accomplishments. That same traceability carries into company-wide calibration, where committee members receive a pre-read flagging potential bias and inconsistent ratings, and can trace any decision back to the evidence behind it.

Windmill covers the broader performance stack too: 1:1s, agentic employee onboarding that meets new hires on day one, continuous feedback, pulse surveys, and analytics. It connects to the tools teams already use — Slack, Jira, Figma, Notion, Google Workspace, Asana, and dozens more — so the evidence exists without extra data entry. The company publishes SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance claims, and pricing is handled through a demo conversation.

**Pricing & Plans:** Contact for pricing. Windmill books a demo to scope plans for your team size and modules rather than listing public self-serve tiers.

- **Windy, the AI review assistant:** An in-Slack agent that runs check-ins, collects peer input, and drafts performance reviews from evidence it gathered during the quarter.
- **Self-prepping 1:1 agendas:** Agendas are assembled from the week's actual work, with space for the employee to add what is on their mind before the meeting.
- **Continuous feedback loops:** Windy notices when two people finish something together and asks how it went, so feedback arrives in days rather than six months later.
- **Traceable calibration:** Committee members get a bias-flagged pre-read and a rating grid where every placement can be traced back to supporting evidence.
- **Wide tool integrations:** Connects to Slack, Jira, Figma, Notion, Google Workspace, Asana and more than 32 other tools so evidence is collected automatically.

**Strengths:** Evidence gathering happens continuously in Slack, so nothing depends on recall; Drafted reviews and 1:1 agendas remove the heaviest admin work from managers; Calibration built around traceable evidence and bias flagging supports fairness; Integrates with common work tools, so adoption does not require new data entry

**Limitations:** Pricing is not published, so you must book a demo to understand cost; Value depends on team adoption in Slack — low engagement weakens the evidence trail; It is a broader people platform, which can be more than a small team needs

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and Windmill (Windy) compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Windmill (Windy) has 24,480. 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%; Windmill (Windy) has +20.6%.

### 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). Windmill (Windy): Contact for Pricing. Contact for pricing. Windmill books a demo to scope plans for your team size and modules rather than listing public self-serve tiers.

## 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 | [Skillsoft Percipio](https://openaitools.app/tool/percipio-com) | 2,074,505 | +16.4% | Contact for Pricing | AI-native enterprise skills management and learning platform | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/percipio-com.md) |

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

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