LongCat 2.5 vs DeepSeek vs Kimi: Which One to Pick

Between late October and early November 2026, China shipped three heavyweight models in quick succession: Kimi K3.1 Pro (Oct 23), DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Oct 17 weights update) and Meituan's LongCat 2.5 (GA Nov 2). All three target long-horizon agents and coding, yet their prices differ by an order of magnitude and their openness varies widely. This article follows the framework of ToolPilotPro's three-way comparison, with one key correction: that comparison, updated Nov 4, called LongCat API-only with weights "coming soon" — but on Nov 4 itself, LongCat 2.5's MIT weights had already landed on Hugging Face. This comparison uses the Nov 4 reality.

The three models at a glance

One structural difference stands out first: LongCat and DeepSeek follow a "cheap + MIT open weights" route, while Kimi is "much pricier + custom licence." Kimi is the largest model (2.8T total parameters, 104B active — more than twice LongCat's active count), but also the most expensive: its input price is nearly 7× LongCat's, its output price more than 8×. DeepSeek's 384K max output is the highest of the three — a real advantage for tasks needing very long continuous generation.

Price round: four bills for the same workload

Unit prices alone mislead, so the comparison fixes a workload: 40M input tokens a month (half cached) plus 8M output. On that basis the four bills are: DeepSeek $7.86 off-peak and $15.72 at peak; LongCat $15.72; Kimi $124. LongCat's limited-time price exactly equals DeepSeek's peak price — in other words, whenever DeepSeek is off-peak, LongCat costs twice as much; at peak hours they tie. Kimi's bill is roughly 8× LongCat's, a gap that "better capability" can hardly erase at any workload, unless the task is one only Kimi can do.

Two caveats matter: first, LongCat's $0.30 / $1.20 is a limited-time discount with no end date and no published list price, and Meituan has said nothing about pricing after the discount ends; second, DeepSeek's price splits between peak and off-peak hours, so the real bill depends on when you call. For budget-sensitive teams, those two points matter more than the headline rates.

Benchmark round: check the harness before the score

Laid side by side, the three vendors' benchmark tables have a bigger problem than who scores higher: the harnesses don't match. Take DeepSWE: 64.6 in LongCat's table, 77.0 in DeepSeek's, 75.5 in Kimi's — the same benchmark name, different versions and harnesses, not directly comparable. The telling detail: LongCat's own table lists DeepSeek's DeepSWE at 74.2, which doesn't match the 77.0 in DeepSeek's own table. Same model, different harness, and the gap can reach double digits (Artificial Analysis measured LongCat 2.0's Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 50.2%, versus 70.8 in Meituan's table — a 20-point difference). So benchmark numbers in a three-way comparison show rough relative position, not a precise ranking.

On independent scoring the three are in different positions: Kimi holds an independent AI Index rank of No. 4 at about $1.98 per task; LongCat has no independent score of any kind as of Nov 13, and Artificial Analysis has not yet listed 2.5. Until independent reproductions appear, LongCat's 31 official scores should all be read as vendor-reported and discounted accordingly.

Openness and availability: Nov 4 rewrote the conclusion

This is the part of the comparison that had to be corrected. ToolPilotPro called LongCat "the only model you can't own" — API-only, weights coming soon. That was true before Nov 4 and wrong after it: on Nov 4, LongCat 2.5's full weights (3.3 TB) and a W4A4 quantized build (1.24 TB) were released on Hugging Face under the MIT licence, with creation times and licence verified by ModelBrief via the Hugging Face API. With that correction, the openness ranking flips completely: LongCat and DeepSeek both ship MIT weights, and Kimi becomes the most licence-restricted of the three (custom licence). Of course, a 3.3 TB download plus NPU-oriented deployment guidance means most users will still go through the API — but "downloadable" versus "not downloadable" is a difference in kind.

On availability, DeepSeek has the widest coverage; Kimi was on OpenRouter from day one; LongCat is not on OpenRouter (a Nov 13 check found only 2.0), but is reachable through Vercel AI Gateway and AnyRouter, with a free tier on OpenCode. The channel gap is closing, but DeepSeek's ecosystem depth still leads the three.