// Comparison
DeepSeek vs Mistral AI
Both are free AI APIs verified on APIVault. Here's how their free tiers, trust scores, and requirements stack up side by side.
By APIVault trust score, Mistral AI edges ahead (96/100 vs 92/100) — but the right pick depends on what you're building. See the breakdown below.
DeepSeek
Mistral AI
Trust Score
Trust Score
92/100
96/100
Reliability
Reliability
100/100
100/100
Free Tier
Free Tier
85/100
100/100
Documentation
Documentation
88/100
88/100
Popularity
Popularity
95/100
88/100
Category
Category
LLM
LLM
Free tier
Free tier
5M tokens free · then $0.14/M input · no card
1 req/sec · 500k tokens/month · no card
Credit card
Credit card
Not required
Not required
Phone
Phone
Not required
Not required
Models
Models
DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1
Mistral Large 3, Codestral, Pixtral
DeepSeek
- Top-tier reasoning at lowest price
- $0.14/M input is industry-low
- Open weights available
- Server sometimes overloaded
- Limited multimodal support
Mistral AI
- Strong European presence (GDPR)
- Open weights for top models
- Code-specialized models
- Free tier has strict rate limits
- Vision models are newer