DeepSeek V4-Pro wins on price ($0.435 vs $2/1M input). For most workflows, Qwen 3.8 Max is the stronger default — best chinese flagship — beats gpt-5.6 sol on coding, #2 globally for vision.
The safest Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro default, the cheaper option worth trying first, and the specialist pick — before you read the detail below.
Qwen 3.8 Max is the strongest answer here for Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro — pick it when quality of output matters more than the $2.00/1M/1M input you pay for it.
DeepSeek V4-Pro handles the same job for about 84% less per token. Start here and only move up if the output is not good enough.
Qwen 3.8 Max is the fastest of these for Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro — worth it when latency is what the reader notices, not the last few points of reasoning depth.
Qwen 3.8 Max leads on coding with a score of 93 vs 93 for DeepSeek V4-Pro.
DeepSeek V4-Pro is cheaper at $0.435/1M input tokens vs $2/1M for Qwen 3.8 Max.
Qwen 3.8 Max is the stronger default for coding tasks.
Qwen 3.8 Max is the safer default: it is built for multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale, which covers most of what people bring to this comparison.
DeepSeek V4-Pro earns its place when your work is mostly frontier-level coding and reasoning on a budget, even though it loses the overall count here.
DeepSeek V4-Pro is the more cost-efficient option at $0.435/1M input — Qwen 3.8 Max costs 5x 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 Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro answer changes when cost, speed, or long-document depth leads the decision.
Alibaba / Balanced / Aug 6, 2026
Best Chinese flagship — beats GPT-5.6 Sol on coding, #2 globally for vision.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
You need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency.
Where the Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro recommendation shifts once you weigh price or latency differently.
Best Chinese flagship — beats GPT-5.6 Sol on coding, #2 globally for vision.
Best open-weights flagship — near-frontier coding at a tenth of the price.
List prices and published scores — the numbers this page's pick is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.8 MaxAlibaba | $2.00/1M | $6.00/1M | $32 | 1M tokens | Balanced | 93 | 85 | 88 |
| DeepSeek V4-ProDeepSeek | $0.43/1M | $0.87/1M | $6.09 | 1M tokens | Balanced | 93 | 80 | 85 |
Scores out of 100 — how we evaluate models. “Est. month” is 10M in / 2M out at list price: a ceiling, no discounts.
Why each one is on the shortlist for Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro, what it is genuinely good at, and where we would steer you away from it.
Our pick for Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro. It scores 93/100 on the coding axis we weight this page by, and nothing else in this shortlist matches it on output quality.
Alibaba's largest model ever — a 2.4-trillion-parameter MoE (95B active) multimodal flagship that beat GPT-5.6 Sol on SWE-bench Pro and ranks #2 globally for vision.
You need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency.
The strongest Chinese multimodal flagship and a legitimate SWE-bench Pro upset over GPT-5.6 Sol. If vision matters, only Fable 5-class models beat it — at 3–8x the price. Wait for independent evals before betting production on the self-reported numbers.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the Qwen 3.8 Max page.
The value option for Qwen 3.8 Max vs DeepSeek V4-Pro: about 84% less per token than Qwen 3.8 Max, at 93/100 on coding. Worth starting here and moving up only if the output disappoints.
DeepSeek's 1.6T-parameter (49B active) MoE flagship with hybrid sparse attention — near-frontier coding and reasoning at roughly a tenth of closed-rival pricing, MIT-licensed open weights.
You need vision input, verified agentic performance, or predictable pricing (surge pricing and an announced increase loom).
The open-weights frontier flagship of 2026. Self-reported numbers flatter it and independent agentic scores land lower, but even discounted it's the most capability per dollar in the directory's upper tier — with MIT-licensed weights.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the DeepSeek V4-Pro page.
UseRightAI recommendations are based on practical decision factors people actually feel in day-to-day use.
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Qwen 3.8 Max wins on more of the categories we score — coding, multimodal, reasoning — so it is the better default of the two. DeepSeek V4-Pro is the better pick when your work is mostly frontier-level coding and reasoning on a budget. Neither is universally "better": Qwen 3.8 Max is aimed at multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale, DeepSeek V4-Pro at frontier-level coding and reasoning on a budget.
DeepSeek V4-Pro is cheaper at $0.435/1M input and $0.87/1M output. Qwen 3.8 Max costs $2/1M input and $6/1M output.
Both Qwen 3.8 Max and DeepSeek V4-Pro have the same 1M context window.
Qwen 3.8 Max and DeepSeek V4-Pro are similarly matched on coding. GPT-6 Astra is the overall coding leader in this directory at 100/100.
Both Qwen 3.8 Max and DeepSeek V4-Pro have similar speed profiles — rated balanced. Neither will be the bottleneck if latency is your deciding factor.
Well behind Claude Fable 5 on SWE-bench Pro (67.7 vs 80.0) and behind several Anthropic models on text rankings. No independent third-party benchmarks at GA — early claims are largely Alibaba-reported. Avoid it if you need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency. That is the main case for looking at DeepSeek V4-Pro instead.
Independent harnesses report much lower agentic scores than the self-reported numbers; trails GPT-5.6 and Opus-class on hard agentic evals. Peak-hour surge pricing doubles rates, a price increase is announced, and it's text-only (no vision). Avoid it if you need vision input, verified agentic performance, or predictable pricing (surge pricing and an announced increase loom). Against Qwen 3.8 Max specifically, the two are close enough on capability that price and speed decide it.
Take a moderate workload of 10M input and 2M output tokens a month. Qwen 3.8 Max runs $32.00 (at $2/1M in and $6/1M out); DeepSeek V4-Pro runs $6.09 (at $0.435/1M in and $0.87/1M out). That is a $25.91/month difference — DeepSeek V4-Pro is the cheaper of the two at this volume, and the gap scales linearly as you send more. 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 Max for multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale, with DeepSeek V4-Pro handling frontier-level coding and reasoning on a budget. Routing high-volume, low-stakes calls to DeepSeek V4-Pro at $0.435/1M and reserving Qwen 3.8 Max for the hard cases is usually the cheapest arrangement that does not cost you quality.