DeepSeek vs Gemma

DeepSeek

Pick DeepSeek for the price-performance of the API and the open weights, not for the chat app, which is a plain assistant without the connectors and workspace features the big consumer products now carry. For a developer paying per token it is hard to beat; for a company with data-residency rules the China-hosted service and PRC-law terms settle the question before quality does.

Pros

• +Flash output at $1.20 per million tokens peak and $0.60 off-peak undercuts every Western frontier API by a wide margin
• +Open-weight releases mean the models can be run locally or on any cloud, with no lock-in to the hosted service
• +1M-token context on both current models, with cached-input pricing that makes long agent loops cheap
• +Chat app is free on web, iOS and Android with no tier to upgrade to

Cons

• −Terms are governed by the law of mainland China and the operator is a Hangzhou company, which rules it out for many regulated buyers
• −Peak and off-peak pricing by UTC window makes budgeting and benchmarking fiddly
• −Concurrency caps (2,500 for Flash, 500 for V4-Pro) and periodic capacity squeezes hit production workloads
• −The chat product trails ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on connectors, projects and team features

Gemma

Gemma is a good starting point when you want an open model you can run locally or fine-tune, with good tooling support and permissive licensing in the latest generation. Pick the size to match your hardware, and treat the small variants as edge models rather than replacements for large hosted ones.

Pros

• +Wide range of sizes, from edge models to a 31B model
• +Apache 2.0 license for Gemma 4 allows commercial use and modification
• +Works with Ollama, LM Studio, Hugging Face, PyTorch, JAX and Android tooling
• +Specialised variants for medical, safety and function-calling use cases

Cons

• −Weights only: you provide the hardware, serving stack and safety layer
• −Older generations such as Gemma 2 use different, more restrictive terms
• −Google's page warns the models can produce inaccurate or offensive content

Does DeepSeek or Gemma have a free tier?

Both: DeepSeek has a free tier, and Gemma is free to use.

Which has a public API, DeepSeek or Gemma?

DeepSeek ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for Gemma is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.