DeepSeek vs Kimi

DeepSeek

A Chinese AI lab's open-weight models and chat app. Strong at reasoning and coding, with very low API prices and weights that can be run locally.

Kimi

Moonshot AI's assistant and model family, built on the open-weight Kimi K3 model (released July 2026) with up to a 1M-token context window. The app adds agent features for research, slides, spreadsheets, websites, and coding through Kimi Code.

DeepSeek

• Open-source and can be self-hosted
• Exceptional reasoning and coding performance
• Very low API costs compared to OpenAI

• Web version raises privacy concerns
• Censors politically sensitive topics
• Smaller ecosystem than OpenAI or Anthropic

Kimi

• K3 weights are downloadable, so the model can be self-hosted or used through many API providers
• Up to 1M tokens of context on the Max and Ultra plans
• Agent features (Swarm sub-agents, scheduled tasks, Deep Research) included in the app
• Usable free tier and lower plan prices than most Western assistants

• The custom K3 license restricts commercial inference above $20M in annual revenue
• Chinese provider, which raises data-residency and compliance questions for some teams
• Plan names, credits, and limits change often
• Smaller third-party integration ecosystem than ChatGPT or Claude

DeepSeek

• Mathematical and logical reasoning
• Code generation and debugging
• Running a powerful LLM locally for privacy
• Cost-efficient API usage for developers

Kimi

• Analyzing long documents and large file sets in one conversation
• Agentic research and multi-source reports
• Generating slides, spreadsheets, and simple websites from a prompt
• Coding with the Kimi Code agent
• Self-hosting or calling an open-weight frontier model through an API