Kimi vs DeepSeek: Which Chinese AI Should You Use?

Kimi vs DeepSeek is now a clear trade between strength and price. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, launched on 28 October 2026, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 46. DeepSeek’s best model, V4.1-Flash-1017, scores 32.5. But DeepSeek’s chat app is free, with no paid plan at all, and its API costs about a fifteenth of Kimi’s off-peak.

Both apps come from Chinese labs, both publish open model weights, and both look like the same kind of product from the outside. They are not. This guide compares the model each app actually runs and what Kimi’s plans give you against DeepSeek’s free app. Then it covers the API price at peak and off-peak hours, coding, where each company stores your chats, and the Mac. Prices come from Moonshot’s and DeepSeek’s own pages, scores from Artificial Analysis, and privacy terms from each company’s own policies and terms of service, all read on 28 October 2026.

The Key Takeaways

• Strength: Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 46 on the Intelligence Index v5. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 scores 32.5, and DeepSeek’s bigger V4 Pro only 23.1.
• App price: DeepSeek’s chat app is free and has no subscription. Kimi has a limited free plan and paid plans at $19, $39, $99 and $199 a month.
• API price: Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $2 / $10 per million tokens. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash costs $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak and $0.30 / $1.20 at peak.
• Privacy: DeepSeek stores your data in China. Kimi runs two services: kimi.com keeps data in China, and kimi.ai can store it outside your country. Neither has a settings switch for training, only opt-out requests.
• Mac: Kimi has a desktop app for Apple silicon Macs. DeepSeek has no desktop chat app, only a desktop agent called DeepSeek Harness.

Kimi vs DeepSeek: The Short Answer

Pick Kimi if you want the stronger assistant and will pay for it. Kimi K3.1 Pro is the highest-scoring Chinese model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5. It makes far fewer confident mistakes than DeepSeek’s model on the same index. Its paid plans add agents, Slides, Deep Research and the Kimi Code coding tool.

Pick DeepSeek if you want a capable chatbot for free, or the cheapest serious API from a Chinese lab. DeepSeek charges nothing for its app, answers about four times faster than Kimi K3.1 Pro on the API, and its newest model ships under the MIT licence.

The trade is a weaker model, a habit of guessing when it does not know, and data stored in China.

What Kimi and DeepSeek Actually Are

Kimi is Moonshot AI’s agent app

Kimi is the chat app and agent platform from Moonshot AI, a Beijing AI lab. Its flagship model is Kimi K3.1 Pro, released on 23 October 2026, with a faster K3.1 Pro Highspeed version that Moonshot says runs two to three times quicker. Moonshot says K3.1 Pro is rolling out on Kimi.com, the Kimi mobile apps, the Kimi Work desktop app and Kimi Code.

Moonshot has promised the K3.1 Pro weights by 4 November 2026. Until then, only the previous flagship, Kimi K3, is downloadable, under Moonshot’s own Kimi K3 licence rather than a standard open licence. The app itself is built around agents: Agent Swarm, Deep Research, Slides, Docs, Sheets and website building all share one monthly credit pool.

DeepSeek is Hangzhou DeepSeek’s free chatbot

DeepSeek is the chat app and API from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence. Its download page describes the app as a way to “chat with leading AI models for free”, and DeepSeek publishes no consumer subscription. On 17 October 2026 DeepSeek upgraded its app and website to V4.1-Flash-1017, the newest build of its small, fast model, according to its own changelog.

DeepSeek also still sells V4 Pro, its larger August model, on the API. V4 Pro is the odd one out: it costs more than V4.1-Flash and scores lower. Every current DeepSeek model is published on Hugging Face under the MIT licence, which lets anyone run, modify and sell it. Our guide to whether DeepSeek is really free covers the catches behind the free app.

Kimi vs DeepSeek: Which Model Is Stronger?

Kimi K3.1 Pro is clearly stronger, by 13.5 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5. The index combines nine evaluations of knowledge work, coding and science, and version 5 builds most of them on private test sets so labs cannot train on the answers. We read every score below on 28 October 2026, the day v5 launched. Every score on the earlier v4.3.2 scale moved, so do not compare these with older articles.

Artificial Analysis named both labs in its own v5 launch post, and the line about open models is the cleanest summary of where the two stand.

Announcing Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, featuring 2 new benchmarks and 3 upgrades. For the first time, the majority of the Index is built on private datasets

The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index is our composite measure of model capabilities across tasks reflecting real-world usage today. v5 is our biggest upgrade since v4 launched in January. With v5, 60% of the Index is now based on evaluations with private test sets or held-out answers.

Alongside Intelligence Index v5, we’re launching the Artificial Analysis Progress Index v1, which tracks model capability over time on one continuous scale.

New to the Intelligence Index:

➤ FrontierCode 2.0: Cognition's newly-launched private benchmark of real-world coding tasks, graded on whether a repository maintainer would merge the agent's change

➤ Terminal-Bench-Science: 70 agentic scientific research tasks, run in a terminal environment

Upgraded:

➤ HLE-Diamond (replacing Humanity's Last Exam): a refined 1,000-question version of Humanity's Last Exam, split evenly between reasoning and knowledge questions

➤ AA-Omniscience v1.1: An updated dataset with saturated and public set questions removed, new questions added, and ambiguous or erroneous questions revised

➤ CritPt v2: a private, 40-question hard subset of CritPt v2, revised by the CritPt authors and run with a code-execution tool

Staying in the Index: AA-Briefcase, AutomationBench-AA, GDP.pdf and Terminal-Bench 4.0

Removed from the Index: GDPval-AA v2.1, SciCode, and AA-LCR v1.1

Key results:

➤ Claude Opus 5.5 (max) leads at 58, ahead of GPT-6 Astra (max, 57) and GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 55): Anthropic and OpenAI hold the top five models. Gemini 4 Argon (high) is next at 50

➤ The open weights gap widens from 3 points to 12: Kimi K3.1 Pro (weights not yet released) is the top open weights model at 46. Among released weights, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (max) and GLM-5.3 (max) lead at 32 - 26 points behind the leader and below Claude Haiku 5.5 (max, 36)

➤ Cost per task varies by more than 13x among the leading models: of the 10 highest-scoring models shown, GPT-6.1 Terra (max) is the cheapest at $0.96 per Intelligence Index task and Claude Fable 5.1 (max) the most expensive at $13.04

— Artificial Analysis (@ArtificialAnlys) October 28, 2026

Where DeepSeek still wins on the models

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 wins on speed and on one new coding test. Artificial Analysis measured it at 173 tokens a second on DeepSeek’s own API, more than four times Kimi K3.1 Pro’s 41. On FrontierCode 2.0, a private benchmark graded on whether a repository maintainer would merge the change, DeepSeek’s small model edges Kimi K3.1 Pro, 28.5% to 25.5%. On the older, public Terminal-Bench 4.0, Kimi wins by double.

Why the reliability gap matters in chat

The reliability gap is the number that matters most for everyday questions. The Artificial Analysis Omniscience Index (version 1.1) rewards correct answers, penalises wrong ones, and does not penalise a model for saying it does not know. A score of 0 means as many wrong answers as right ones. Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 29.9. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 scores 0.9, so on hard factual questions it guesses wrong about as often as it gets them right. Check any fact DeepSeek gives you before you rely on it.

Kimi vs DeepSeek: Free and Paid Plans

DeepSeek’s app costs nothing, and Kimi’s useful features sit behind a subscription. Kimi’s prices come from Moonshot’s membership pricing page, in US dollars before tax. DeepSeek publishes no consumer pricing page, because there is nothing to buy.

What Kimi’s free plan leaves out

Kimi’s free plan is a trial of the agent features, not the full product. It allows one agent task at a time, two projects and 500MB of project storage, and it does not include Kimi Code. Moonshot also has not said whether free users get Kimi K3.1 Pro. Its pricing page warns that “K3.1 Pro requests may queue or fail at launch”, so check the model picker before you assume you are on the flagship.

The free plan is enough to test Kimi. It is not enough to work in it.

Kimi’s paid plans share one pool of credits across chat, agents, Slides, Kimi Code and the desktop agent, metered by tokens used. A long Deep Research job on Plus can eat into the credits you wanted for coding. The 1 million token chat window that Kimi advertises is listed only on Max and Ultra. Our Kimi pricing guide breaks down every tier.

What DeepSeek’s free app gives you

DeepSeek’s free app gives you its newest model with no plan to choose. Its chat box has two switches, DeepThink for step-by-step reasoning and Search for the web, and DeepSeek’s changelog says the app now runs V4.1-Flash-1017. What it lacks is Kimi’s agent layer: there are no Slides, no website builder and no agent swarm in the chat app. DeepSeek’s agent work happens in a separate developer tool, DeepSeek Harness, which bills through the API.

Kimi vs DeepSeek API Pricing

DeepSeek’s API is between 7 and 17 times cheaper than Kimi’s on uncached tokens, depending on the hour and the token type. On cached input the gap is wider still. Kimi charges one flat rate. DeepSeek charges a peak and off-peak pair, which most comparison sites miss. Peak hours are 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays, outside Chinese public holidays. Every other hour costs half. The rates below come from DeepSeek’s models and pricing page and Moonshot’s API pricing page, per million tokens.

What a month of API use costs

For a workload of 10 million input tokens and 2 million output tokens a month, with no caching, Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $40. The same work on DeepSeek V4.1-Flash costs $2.70 if it all runs off-peak and $5.40 if it all runs at peak. That makes Kimi about 15 times dearer off-peak and 7 times dearer at peak. Per token, Kimi K3.1 Pro charges 13 times DeepSeek’s off-peak input rate and 17 times its off-peak output rate.

Artificial Analysis also measures what each model spends to finish one index task, at DeepSeek’s peak price. Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $3.68 a task, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 $0.60 and V4 Pro $1.77. V4 Pro costs about three times as much as its smaller sibling for a lower score. Our DeepSeek pricing guide covers the cache and peak rules in full.

DeepSeek is not the cheapest API overall

DeepSeek is far cheaper than Kimi, but it is no longer the cheapest model of its strength. Claude Haiku 5.5 scores 36.2 on the same index and costs $0.10 / $0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. On those prompts it beats DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 on score and costs less even off-peak. If you only want a cheap API, compare against Haiku before you commit to either Chinese lab.

Coding: Kimi Code vs DeepSeek Harness

Kimi is the better coding agent, and DeepSeek is the cheaper one to run. Kimi Code is Moonshot’s coding tool, included in every paid Kimi plan from $19 a month. On the new plans it has a rolling five-hour usage limit and no weekly limit. It also draws on the shared credit pool. Moonshot reports Kimi K3.1 Pro at 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 in the Claude Code harness, and Artificial Analysis measured 67% in its own run.

DeepSeek’s answer is DeepSeek Harness, a desktop agent in preview for Apple silicon Macs and Windows that DeepSeek pitches for coding as well as documents and spreadsheets. It has no subscription and bills through the DeepSeek API. DeepSeek’s API also speaks the Anthropic format, so you can point Claude Code at it. DeepSeek reports V4.1-Flash-1017 at 42.3% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, also in the Claude Code harness, and Artificial Analysis measured 34%.

The choice comes down to how you pay. A heavy coder on Kimi pays a flat monthly fee and hits a five-hour limit. A heavy coder on DeepSeek pays per token, cheaply, and gets a weaker agent. DeepSeek starts charging for the web search and fetch calls its agents make on 1 November 2026, Beijing time (16:00 UTC on 31 October), at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.

Privacy: Where Kimi and DeepSeek Send Your Data

Both companies use your chats to train their models, and DeepSeek stores everything in China. The difference is in the details of where and how you can opt out.

DeepSeek stores your chats in China

DeepSeek stores everything you type in China. Its privacy policy, last updated on 10 February 2026, names Hangzhou DeepSeek as the data controller and states: “we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in People’s Republic of China.” It uses your data to “train and improve our technology”. Its list of privacy rights includes the right to opt out of training, exercised by emailing [email protected], and it says those rights apply depending on where you live. There is no switch in settings.

Kimi runs two services under two policies

Kimi has two privacy policies, and which one applies depends on the site you use. On kimi.com, Beijing Moonshot Technology says your data is stored in China and not sent abroad without separate consent. You can ask customer service to stop using your content for training. Kimi.ai is the international service, run by Novascent Private Limited, a company registered in Singapore. Its privacy policy says your content is used for “training and optimizing” its models and lets Novascent store it on servers outside your country of residence. There is no switch in the app. Instead, kimi.ai’s terms of service let you opt out by emailing [email protected], and the opt-out only covers future training.

Censorship and government tests

Government tests found political slant in DeepSeek and weak cyber safeguards in Kimi. In September 2025 the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) tested DeepSeek’s earlier models. They “echoed four times as many inaccurate and misleading CCP narratives as U.S. reference models did”, according to NIST’s summary of the evaluation. In July 2026 the UK and US institutes tested Kimi K3 for cyber skills and found that its safeguards “allow assistance with agentic cyber exploit development”. Neither test covers the newest models. For anything touching Chinese politics, check either app’s answer against a Western model, and keep client data out of both. Our guide to whether DeepSeek is safe for US and EU users covers the government bans.

Kimi and DeepSeek on a Mac and iPhone

Kimi has a real Mac app and DeepSeek does not. Moonshot’s Kimi Work desktop app runs on Windows and on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 12 or later. Its local agent can organise files and produce documents on your machine, and Moonshot still labels it beta. DeepSeek’s only desktop download is DeepSeek Harness, an agent for code, documents and spreadsheets, which needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 13 or later. For ordinary chat on a Mac, DeepSeek means a browser tab.

On iPhone both are free downloads from the App Store. On 28 October 2026 the Kimi app held 4.7 stars from about 5,300 ratings and the DeepSeek app 3.9 stars from about 12,400, according to their App Store listings. Neither company has an app in the Mac App Store, so a search there for either name returns third-party apps from other developers.

Which One Should You Pick

Pick DeepSeek if you want a free chatbot and will check its facts. It costs nothing, answers fast, runs the newest DeepSeek model, and its API is the cheap option when you build. Keep confidential work out of it, because it is stored in China.

Pick Kimi if you want the stronger model and the agent tools, and will pay $19 a month or more. Kimi K3.1 Pro makes fewer mistakes, leads on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and comes with Kimi Code, Deep Research and a Mac app. If you are weighing a Western option, we compare Moonshot’s assistant in Kimi vs Claude and Kimi vs ChatGPT. Our roundup of the best Chinese AI models puts both next to Qwen, GLM and MiMo.

Or use Kimi and DeepSeek without choosing

You do not have to settle the trade at all. Ask DeepSeek for the quick answer, then send the same question to Kimi when it matters, in the same window and without a second account. Fello AI puts Kimi and DeepSeek side by side in one native app for Mac, iPhone and iPad, next to GPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok. That also gives you DeepSeek in a Mac chat app, which DeepSeek itself does not make. There is a free tier to try it.

The Verdict

Kimi is the better assistant and DeepSeek is the better deal, and the gap between them just got wider.

On the Intelligence Index v5, Kimi K3.1 Pro leads DeepSeek’s best model by 13.5 points and is far less likely to make up an answer. That is worth $19 a month if you use agents, write code or need answers you can trust. DeepSeek wins on everything that costs money: a free app, an API that undercuts Kimi by 7 to 17 times on uncached tokens, and MIT weights you can run yourself today. If you chat casually, use DeepSeek and check its facts. If the answer matters, pay for Kimi, and keep anything confidential out of both.

Frequently Asked Questions