head-to-head

StepFun: Step 5 Preview vs DeepSeek: DeepSeek Flash Latest

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-09.

StepFun: Step 5 Preview DeepSeek: DeepSeek Flash Latest
Vendorstepfun~deepseek
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score74.2-
Input Price$1.00/M$0.02/M
Output Price$2.70/M$1.20/M
Context Window1,000,0001,048,576
Max Output64,000943,718
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index72.2-

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, DeepSeek Flash Latest costs $0.32 and Step 5 Preview costs $1.68, so DeepSeek Flash Latest is about 5.3 times cheaper for the same work.

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

Only Step 5 Preview offers video input.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Step 5 Preview scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), DeepSeek Flash Latest on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others).

Step 5 Preview was released in October 2026 and DeepSeek Flash Latest in September 2026.

Pick Step 5 Preview if you need video input or the stronger all-round task scores; pick DeepSeek Flash Latest if you need lower cost.

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?

TaskStepFun: Step 5 PreviewDeepSeek: DeepSeek Flash Latest
SQL Generation 142 133
Code Review 145 132
Code Completion 120 131
Code Refactoring 147 136
Bug Fixing 149 136
Unit Test Generation 132 124
Code Documentation 137 131
Regex Writing 126 119
CI/CD Pipelines 128 120
Frontend Component Design 130 122
Data Analysis 134 124
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 136 133
ETL Scripting 138 128
JSON Extraction 123 131
Bulk Data Labeling 120 129
OCR / Document Parsing 134 131
Table Extraction from PDFs 134 131
Long-Document Summarization 149 137
Short-Form Summarization 118 123
Blog Post Writing 130 121

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

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