Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Gemma 4 (Google · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Gemma 4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek R1 is "MIT", Gemma 4 is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | EU-ready Major licence shift from Gemma 2/3: Apache 2.0 across the family. 140+ languages, multimodal (text/image/audio/video on small sizes), 128K-256K context. Strong permissive default for EU deployments that need robust multilingual support. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Partial |
| Origin | China | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | 32/100 |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.