Models / Compare /DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Kimi K2.6
Head to head
DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Kimi K2.6
Compared on live catalog data — pricing synced daily, benchmark scores with provenance.
The short version
- DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheaper to run hosted: $0.87/M output vs $2.48/M for Kimi K2.6 (2.9× difference at the cheapest tracked provider).
- DeepSeek V4 Pro takes 1M tokens of context vs 262K for Kimi K2.6.
- DeepSeek V4 Pro has downloadable weights (OPEN) so you can self-host it; we hold no downloadable copy of Kimi K2.6, so it runs through a provider's API.
- DeepSeek V4 Pro scores 71.57 on LiveBench vs 70.54 via Thinking for Kimi K2.6.
- Kimi K2.6 scores 46.92 via Thinking on LiveBench Agentic Coding vs 42.63 for DeepSeek V4 Pro.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | DeepSeek | Moonshot AI |
| Parameters | 1.6T / 37B | 1.1T / 32B |
| 1M | 262K | |
| Weights | OPEN | OPEN* |
| License | MIT License | Custom licence |
| Modality | text->text | text+image->text |
| Released | Apr 22, 2026 | Apr 14, 2026 |
| 1008 GBest | 667.5 GBest | |
| Cheapest hosted | $0.43 / $0.87 per 1M (OpenRouter) | $0.59 / $2.48 per 1M (OpenRouter) |
| Tracked providers | 23 | 26 |
DeepSeek V4 Pro — our take
DeepSeek V4 Pro is a large downloadable text model with a one-million-token request limit and a permissive MIT licence. It excels at coding and hard-prompt tasks on the independent leaderboards we track, though its creative-writing score lags behind its other skills.
full breakdown →Kimi K2.6 — our take
Kimi K2.6 is a large mixture-of-experts model from Moonshot AI that accepts text and images and handles up to 262,144 tokens in a single request. It is the strongest coder in our measured set, with a coding score well above its general chat rating, though its creative writing lags behind both.
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