head-to-head

DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) vs Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-27.

DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash
Vendordeepseekqwen
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score66.3-
Input Price$0.11/M$0.15/M
Output Price$0.34/M$0.47/M
Context Window1,048,5761,000,000
Max Output131,072131,072
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index65.1-

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) costs $0.20 and Qwen3.8 Flash costs $0.27, so DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) is about 1.4 times cheaper for the same work.

Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,048,576 and 1,000,000 tokens, about 1,573 and 1,500 pages.

Only Qwen3.8 Flash offers video input.

Across the 19 tasks where they differ, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) scores higher on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) was released in September 2026 and Qwen3.8 Flash in August 2026.

Pick DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) if you need lower cost or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.8 Flash if you need video input.

Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.

Who wins by task?

TaskDeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch)Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash
SQL Generation 141 133
Code Review 144 132
Code Completion 133 131
Code Refactoring 146 136
Bug Fixing 148 136
Unit Test Generation 131 124
Code Documentation 137 131
Regex Writing 126 119
CI/CD Pipelines 127 120
Frontend Component Design 129 122
Data Analysis 133 124
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 136 133
ETL Scripting 137 128
Bulk Data Labeling 129 129
OCR / Document Parsing 134 131
Table Extraction from PDFs 134 131
Long-Document Summarization 148 137
Short-Form Summarization 127 123
Blog Post Writing 129 121

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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