Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Qwen3-Max offers 134.3K more tokens in context window than DeepSeek-R1. Qwen3-Max is $0.74 cheaper per million tokens. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-R1, released by DeepSeek on January 20, 2025, is a large reasoning model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active in its MoE architecture) designed for extended chain-of-thought reasoning. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated strong performance on mathematics, coding, and scientific reasoning benchmarks at its release. DeepSeek-R1 targets complex analytical tasks, competitive programming, and applications requiring deep deliberative reasoning under an open MIT license.
Alibaba / Qwen
Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.
7 months newer

DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek
2025-01-20
Qwen3-Max
Alibaba / Qwen
2025-09-05
Cost per million tokens (USD)
DeepSeek-R1
Qwen3-Max
Context window and performance specifications
Available providers and their performance metrics
DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek
Qwen3-Max
DeepSeek-R1
Qwen3-Max
DeepSeek-R1
Qwen3-Max
OpenRouter