In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $2.50 per million tokens, so Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite costs 2.1 times as much.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite reads more at once: a context window of 1M tokens against 1M.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite can't.
- No independent board we follow ranks both models yet.
Side by side
The specs.
| DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | DeepSeek · China | Google · US |
| Released | Oct 17, 2026 | Jul 21, 2026 |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $1.20 out (peak-hours price) | $0.30 in / $2.50 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text, image, video, audio, pdf |
| Download and run it yourself | Yes (MIT) | No |
| Size | 552B backbone parameters parameters, 8B per token during prefill, 16B during decode active | Not published |
| Maker says | “Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version.” | “Our fastest, most cost-effective 3.5 model for high-throughput execution.” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
More comparisons