Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | DeepSeek | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.50 | $0.90 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner (44% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.01 | $0.18 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner lower |
| Output / 1M | $2.50 | $1.60 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Context Window | 256k | 128k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner (256k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 384k | 32k | DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner |
| Tokenizer Family | DeepSeek Byte-Level BPE (102k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for DeepSeek-V4.1-Reasoner when your engineering requirements prioritize DeepSeek's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated DeepSeek Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.5/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.