Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
How much capability you get per dollar
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks
Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).
Choose Beam 1.0 if you want trying a permissively licensed open-weight coding model through OpenRouter, or self-hosting it where code must stay on your own hardware. Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if you want existing setups that still call the deepseek-v4-flash name.
In our editorial scoring, DeepSeek V4 Flash leads in 5 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed, value for money and reliability), while Beam 1.0 leads in 0. On price, Beam 1.0 runs about $1.60 per 1M tokens (blended) and is open-weight; DeepSeek V4 Flash is about $0.12 and open-weight.
The agent matters as much as the model. Compare AI agents →
Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute