Llama 4 Maverick vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
The two strongest open-weight models in 2026 sit head-to-head: Meta's Llama 4 Maverick and DeepSeek's V4 Pro. Both ship with permissive licenses that allow commercial use and self-hosting. DeepSeek V4 Pro edges Maverick on most benchmarks, particularly graduate-level science and math, but Maverick has the larger ecosystem of fine-tuned variants, runtime support across cloud partners, and a broader toolchain.
Head-to-Head Specs
| Spec | Llama 4 Maverick | DeepSeek V4 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | DeepSeek |
| Input Price | Free/1M | $1.74/1M |
| Output Price | Free/1M | $3.48/1M |
| Context Window | 1M | 1M |
| Released | 2025-04 | 2026-04 |
| Capabilities | text, vision, code | text, vision, code, reasoning |
Benchmark Scores
| Benchmark | Llama 4 Maverick | DeepSeek V4 Pro | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 89.3 | 91.5 | DeepSeek |
| HumanEval | 91.7 | 94.8 | DeepSeek |
| GPQA Diamond | 64.1 | 73.1 | DeepSeek |
| MATH | 86.7 | 92.4 | DeepSeek |
| SWE-bench | 52.8 | 63.8 | DeepSeek |
See the full benchmark leaderboard for all models.
Category Breakdown
V4 Pro at 91.5 vs Maverick at 89.3
V4 Pro at 94.8 vs Maverick at 91.7
V4 Pro at 63.8 vs Maverick at 52.8
V4 Pro at 73.1 vs Maverick at 64.1
V4 Pro at 92.4 vs Maverick at 86.7
Both permit commercial use and self-hosting under permissive terms.
Llama has a much larger fine-tune and adapter community via Hugging Face.
Both are free to self-host; partner-API pricing varies by host.
Choose Llama 4 Maverick when:
- ▸Largest fine-tune ecosystem matters for your domain
- ▸Llama-Guard, Llama-Stack, and other Meta tooling fits your stack
- ▸Wider support across Together, Fireworks, Groq, Cerebras, AWS Bedrock
- ▸Multimodal applications using Llama 4 Scout for the vision tier
Choose DeepSeek V4 Pro when:
- ▸Strongest open-weight benchmark scores available today
- ▸Code and math workloads
- ▸Self-hosted production with frontier-class quality
- ▸Single-model deployment preferred over fragmented Llama variants
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Llama 4 Maverick or DeepSeek V4 Pro?
It depends on your use case. Llama 4 Maverick from Meta excels at largest fine-tune ecosystem matters for your domain, while DeepSeek V4 Pro from DeepSeek is better for strongest open-weight benchmark scores available today. See the full comparison above for detailed benchmarks and pricing.
How much does Llama 4 Maverick cost compared to DeepSeek V4 Pro?
Llama 4 Maverick costs Free input and Free output per 1M tokens. DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74 input and $3.48 output per 1M tokens.
What is the context window difference between Llama 4 Maverick and DeepSeek V4 Pro?
Llama 4 Maverick supports 1M tokens, while DeepSeek V4 Pro supports 1M tokens.