DeepSeek V4-Flash wins on coding (87 vs 84) and price ($0.14 vs $0.16/1M input). For most workflows, Qwen 3.8 Flash is the stronger default — swe-bench pro 62.5 at sixteen cents per million input.
The shortest way to see the safest default, the lower-cost option, and the specialist pick before you read deeper.
Qwen 3.8 Flash is the safest overall answer here when you want the strongest default instead of the lowest list price.
Mistral: Mistral Nemo is the lower-cost option to start with when you still need useful output at scale.
DeepSeek V4-Flash is the better pick when response speed matters more than maximum reasoning depth.
DeepSeek V4-Flash leads on coding with a score of 87 vs 84 for Qwen 3.8 Flash.
DeepSeek V4-Flash has the larger context window: 1M vs 991K for Qwen 3.8 Flash.
DeepSeek V4-Flash is cheaper at $0.14/1M input tokens vs $0.16/1M for Qwen 3.8 Flash.
Qwen 3.8 Flash is the safer default: it is built for cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning, which covers most of what people bring to this comparison.
DeepSeek V4-Flash earns its place when your work is mostly high-volume agentic coding and tool-use pipelines, even though it loses the overall count here.
DeepSeek V4-Flash is the more cost-efficient option at $0.14/1M input — Qwen 3.8 Flash costs 1x more per input token, so the gap is worth taking seriously wherever token volume rather than peak quality drives the bill.
Switch the scoring lens to see whether the top answer changes when you care more about cost, speed, or long-document work.
Alibaba / Budget / Aug 27, 2026
SWE-bench Pro 62.5 at sixteen cents per million input.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
You need Alibaba's maximum capability — that is Qwen 3.8 Max — or a SWE-bench Verified number.
The fastest way to see where the recommendation shifts when your priority changes.
SWE-bench Pro 62.5 at sixteen cents per million input.
Best agentic capability per dollar in the directory.
Every figure below is the provider's list price or a published capability score — the same numbers the recommendation on this page is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.8 FlashAlibaba | $0.16/1M | $0.47/1M | $2.54 | 991k tokens | Very fast | 84 | 76 | 78 |
| DeepSeek V4-FlashDeepSeek | $0.14/1M | $0.28/1M | $1.96 | 1M tokens | Fast | 87 | 74 | 78 |
Capability scores are out of 100 and reflect our own weighting of published benchmarks and production signals — see how we evaluate models. “Est. month” assumes 10M input and 2M output tokens at list price, with no batch or caching discounts applied, so treat it as a ceiling.
What each one is genuinely good at, where it falls down, and the situations we would steer you away from it — not just the headline score.
Alibaba's preview of the Qwen4 architecture — 125B parameters with only 6B active per token, at sixteen cents per million input.
You need Alibaba's maximum capability — that is Qwen 3.8 Max — or a SWE-bench Verified number.
One of the best coding-score-per-dollar picks in the catalog. Route volume work here and reserve Qwen 3.8 Max or a frontier model for the hard cases.
Released August 26, 2026. The open-weight release is Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a preview of the Qwen4 architecture: 125B mixture-of-experts with 6B active per token, a 51B n-gram embedding table and a 4B multi-token prediction layer. Qwen 3.8 Flash is the production API version on Qwen Cloud at $0.16/$0.47.
A 284B-parameter (13B active) MoE workhorse re-post-trained for agentic and coding tasks — beats the V4-Pro preview on every published agent benchmark at ultra-commodity pricing.
You need vision input or frontier-grade reasoning on the hardest tasks.
The best cheap agent engine of 2026. At $0.14/1M input with an 82.7 Terminal-Bench score, nothing touches its agentic capability per dollar. Use it for volume; escalate the hard 10% to a frontier model.
Official V4-Flash-0731 release July 31, 2026; weights on Hugging Face, API in public beta. Only DeepSeek model supporting the Responses API. DeepSeek has warned of a future price increase.
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Qwen 3.8 Flash wins on more of the categories we score — budget, coding, reasoning — so it is the better default of the two. DeepSeek V4-Flash is the better pick when your work is mostly high-volume agentic coding and tool-use pipelines. Neither is universally "better": Qwen 3.8 Flash is aimed at cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning, DeepSeek V4-Flash at high-volume agentic coding and tool-use pipelines.
DeepSeek V4-Flash is cheaper at $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output. Qwen 3.8 Flash costs $0.16/1M input and $0.47/1M output.
DeepSeek V4-Flash has the larger context window at 1M tokens vs Qwen 3.8 Flash's 991K. For large document analysis, DeepSeek V4-Flash is the stronger pick.
DeepSeek V4-Flash is better for coding with a score of 87 vs Qwen 3.8 Flash's 84 (out of 100). Claude Fable 5 is the overall coding leader in this directory at 100/100.
Qwen 3.8 Flash is faster with a very fast speed rating (score: 5) vs DeepSeek V4-Flash's fast rating (score: 4). Speed matters most for interactive and high-throughput work; for batch jobs the DeepSeek V4-Flash latency penalty is usually invisible.
No published SWE-bench Verified score, only SWE-bench Pro. An architecture preview rather than a settled flagship — Qwen 3.8 Max remains Alibaba's top-end model. Avoid it if you need Alibaba's maximum capability — that is Qwen 3.8 Max — or a SWE-bench Verified number. That is the main case for looking at DeepSeek V4-Flash instead.
Well behind GPT-5.6, Opus-class, and Gemini frontier models on the hardest reasoning and long-horizon work. Text-only, and several headline numbers come from DeepSeek's own unreleased eval framework. Avoid it if you need vision input or frontier-grade reasoning on the hardest tasks. Against Qwen 3.8 Flash specifically, the gap shows up most on coding (84 vs 87).
Take a moderate workload of 10M input and 2M output tokens a month. Qwen 3.8 Flash runs $2.54 (at $0.16/1M in and $0.47/1M out); DeepSeek V4-Flash runs $1.96 (at $0.14/1M in and $0.28/1M out). The gap is small enough that price should not decide this one. Output tokens dominate the bill on both, so prompt length matters far less than response length.
Yes, and for most teams that beats picking one. A common split is Qwen 3.8 Flash for cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning, with DeepSeek V4-Flash handling high-volume agentic coding and tool-use pipelines. Routing high-volume, low-stakes calls to DeepSeek V4-Flash at $0.14/1M and reserving Qwen 3.8 Flash for the hard cases is usually the cheapest arrangement that does not cost you quality.