The deciding difference is operational: vLLM can run on infrastructure you control, DeepSeek cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered.
Strong reasoning and coding at a fraction of frontier pricing, with the weights published so you can move off the API later.
OpenAI-compatible, so it is a base-URL swap. The open weights are the real hedge: if the hosted API is ever unacceptable, the same model runs on vLLM.
High-throughput open-weight serving on your own GPUs.
| DeepSeek | vLLM | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary | Open source |
| Pricing | usage based | open source |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Languages | TypeScript, Python | Python |
| Install | — | pip install vllm |
| Keys required | DEEPSEEK_API_KEY | None |
The deciding difference is operational: vLLM can run on infrastructure you control, DeepSeek cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered. DeepSeek: Strong reasoning and coding at a fraction of frontier pricing, with the weights published so you can move off the API later. vLLM: High-throughput open-weight serving on your own GPUs.
DeepSeek is a hosted service only. vLLM can run on your own infrastructure.
DeepSeek is proprietary (usage based). vLLM is open source (open source).
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/compare/deepseek-vs-vllm