Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Phi-4 (Microsoft · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Phi-4 is EU-ready. They part ways on training data: DeepSeek R1 is "Undisclosed", Phi-4 is "Partial".
| 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 MIT-licensed 14B from Microsoft Research. Heavy use of synthetic training data is disclosed; English-primary (thin multilingual coverage). Strongest small-model option for permissive-licence EU deployments. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Partial |
| Origin | China | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | 10/100 |
| Speed | — | 29 tok/s |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | $0.22/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.