Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between xAI's Grok 2 mini and DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias).
• Grok 2 mini: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Generally Available).
• DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Legacy Reference (API Aliased)).
| Metric | Grok 2 mini | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | DeepSeek | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.14 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) (30% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | None | $0.014 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.00 | $0.28 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 128k | Grok 2 mini (128k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 8.2k | Grok 2 mini |
| Tokenizer Family | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | DeepSeek Byte-level BPE (~128k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Grok 2 mini when your engineering requirements prioritize xAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated xAI Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.2/M input rate.
Opt for DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) when looking for DeepSeek's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $0.28/M rate.