Coding · Head-to-head
DeepSeek vs Cody
DeepSeek (freemium, AI Score 8.7/10) vs Cody (paid, AI Score 6.4/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick DeepSeek if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.7 vs 6.4)
- →you want our editor's pick for this category
Pick Cody if…
- →your primary use case is platform and developer-experience teams at large organisations already running sourcegraph, who need repo-wide ai answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | DeepSeek | Cody |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free chat + API from $0.14/M input tokens (V4-Flash beta) | Enterprise only — check website for current pricing |
| Free tier | Free web and mobile chat with daily usage limits; API is pay-as-you-go, check the platform console for any current credit offer | — |
| AI Score | 8.7/10 | 6.4/10 |
| Best for | Developers who own their agent harness and can hold a stable prompt prefix, since the cache rate is what makes DeepSeek cheap, and whose work is text rather than screenshots or audio. | Platform and developer-experience teams at large organisations already running Sourcegraph, who need repo-wide AI answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development |
| Date added | 2026-05-01 | 2026-05-01 |
Pros and cons
DeepSeek
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓V4-Flash lists $0.14/M input and $0.28/M output, roughly 36x and 107x under GPT-5.6 Sol's $5 and $30
- ✓Cache hits at $0.003/M make a repeated agent prefix nearly free, blending to about $0.06/M on an agent-shaped traffic mix
- ✓MIT-licensed 284B/13B-active weights on Hugging Face, so the same model can be self-hosted or fine-tuned
- ✓1M-token context on both V4-Pro and V4-Flash handles whole codebases without chunking
- ✓Native Responses API plus stated Codex adaptation lets agent harnesses point at it without a chat shim
Cons
- ×Text in, text out — no image, audio or video input, so screenshot-driven debugging is off the table
- ×V4-Flash is a public beta: no SLA, movable rate limits, and no published throughput figure (Artificial Analysis lists Speed as N/A)
- ×Verbose output — 210M tokens across nine evaluations against a 100M median, which eats into the cheap-token advantage
- ×China-hosted inference, and the Responses path parks conversation state on DeepSeek's servers, a compliance question before an engineering one
Cody
Coding · paid
Pros
- ✓Context comes from a real code-search index rather than a bolted-on vector store, so cross-repository answers cite actual definitions and references
- ✓Model routing through Amazon Bedrock or Azure OpenAI keeps inference inside your own cloud account — a hard requirement in regulated environments
- ✓Inherits Sourcegraph repository permissions, so it cannot surface code a user isn't cleared to see
- ✓Self-hosted and air-gapped deployment options that most AI coding assistants simply do not offer
- ✓Adds AI on top of an installation many large engineering orgs already run, rather than introducing a new vendor
Cons
- ×The self-serve Free and Pro tiers were retired in 2025 — individual developers can no longer buy this, which is a major change from earlier reviews
- ×Sourcegraph's agentic coding investment moved to Amp, so Cody no longer receives the company's headline feature work
- ×No autonomous multi-file agent loop comparable to Cursor, Claude Code, or Sourcegraph's own Amp
- ×Requires a Sourcegraph deployment and index before it delivers its one differentiator — a heavy prerequisite if you aren't already a customer
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.