TL;DR: Doubao is ByteDance's AI assistant and China's most used AI app, with 382 million monthly users in June 2026 against DeepSeek's 129 million, per QuestMobile. DeepSeek is cheaper and open: its newest model costs ¥8 per million output tokens at peak, against ¥30 for Doubao Seed 2.1 Pro, and its weights are free to download.
ByteDance’s Doubao models now process 180 trillion tokens a day, Volcano Engine says, and in June ByteDance started charging for the app.
DeepSeek went the other way in September, announcing lower API prices with V4.1-Flash, a model anyone can download and run.
- 1DeepSeek keeps its users longer: 30.0% spend 10 minutes or more, against 27.5% on Doubao.
- 2Doubao Professional costs ¥68 to ¥500 a month. DeepSeek lists no paid plan for its app.
- 3Outside mainland China, doubao.com sends visitors to Dola, ByteDance’s international version.
What Is Doubao?
Doubao (豆包) is ByteDance’s AI assistant and the family of large language models behind it. It launched in China in August 2023 and runs on models built by ByteDance’s Seed team.
Businesses buy the same models through Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud.
The app is a general assistant for chat, search, writing, images and office work. It is free, and since June 24, 2026 there is also a paid Professional version for heavier use.
Outside mainland China, doubao.com asks visitors to log in or use Dola instead, ByteDance’s international version.
More than a chatbot
The Doubao name covers a family of models from ByteDance’s Seed team, not just the chat app.
In the six weeks to August 5, 2026, the Seed blog announced Seed 2.1 for text and agents, Seedream 5.0 Pro for images, Seed Audio 1.0 for audio and Seedance 2.5 for video.
That same video model now runs through Higgsfield too, alongside 30+ other options in one workspace.
It also released a real-time model that listens and watches while it talks.
On Volcano Engine, a model called Doubao-Seed-Evolving is updated frequently and priced the same as Seed 2.1 Pro, for customers who want the newest weights without switching model names.
What Is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab founded by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the hedge fund High-Flyer. It publishes its models as open weights, runs a free chat app and website, and sells API access.
Its R1 reasoning model made it famous in January 2025.
DeepSeek releases fast. Its API change log shows three releases in four weeks:
V4.1-Flash replaced V4-Flash outright. DeepSeek says its KV cache needs a quarter of the GPU memory and an eighth of the SSD storage of the previous generation, which matters for agents because cached input makes up much of their bill.
What DeepSeek spends
DeepSeek’s two public cost figures cover single training runs, not the whole company.
The V3 technical report put its final run at $5.576 million, and the R1 paper in Nature put R1’s reasoning training at $294,000, both at an assumed $2 per GPU hour.
It took outside money for the first time in 2026. CNBC reported in June that DeepSeek was set to raise about 50 billion yuan, or $7.4 billion, at a valuation of $52 billion to $59 billion.
Our DeepSeek statistics cover its traffic, downloads and funding in more depth.
Doubao vs DeepSeek Compared
| Doubao | DeepSeek | |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | ByteDance | DeepSeek, founded by Liang Wenfeng |
| Newest flagship | Seed 2.1 Pro, June 23, 2026 | V4.1-Flash, September 10, 2026 |
| Open weights | No, API only (smaller Seed-OSS models are open) | Yes, MIT license |
| App users in China, June 2026 | 382 million | 129 million |
| Consumer price | Free, or ¥68 to ¥500 a month for Professional | Free; no paid app plan listed |
| API output price | ¥30 per million tokens (Seed 2.1 Pro) | ¥8 per million tokens at peak (V4.1-Flash) |
| Outside mainland China | Dola | Same app and website, with some government-device bans |
Which Has More Users?
Doubao, by a wide margin. QuestMobile’s 2026 half-year report puts Doubao’s app at 382 million monthly active users in June 2026, nearly three times DeepSeek’s 129 million. Alibaba’s Qwen sat between them at 167 million.
DeepSeek gained only 2 million users between March and June, up from 127 million in QuestMobile’s first-quarter report.
The whole category grew fast, and apps grew faster than any other form QuestMobile tracks, including phone makers’ built-in assistants.
China’s AI-native apps reached 499 million monthly users in June, up 85.4% on a year earlier, with a jump over the Spring Festival holiday. Our list of Chinese AI chatbots covers Qwen, Kimi and the rest of the field.
DeepSeek’s users stay longer
The gap closes on engagement. In June 2026, 30.0% of DeepSeek’s users spent 10 minutes or more in the app, against 27.5% for Doubao and 26.1% for Kimi. DeepSeek’s share rose 7.8 points in a year, Doubao’s 2.2.
QuestMobile reads the two apps as taking different routes: Doubao turning its model into an agent that carries out tasks, DeepSeek pushing reasoning. On the web, Similarweb counted 353.8 million visits to deepseek.com in August 2026.
Models and Openness
ByteDance released Seed 2.1 on June 23, 2026, in two sizes, Pro and Turbo. ByteDance pitches it at office and coding agents: planning a project, processing files, analyzing spreadsheets and writing code across tools.
It also claims leading results on video understanding benchmarks.
ByteDance keeps Doubao’s flagship models closed, available only through the app and Volcano Engine’s API.
ByteDance does publish smaller open models on Hugging Face, such as Seed-OSS-36B under the Apache 2.0 license, but not the Seed 2.x line.
DeepSeek publishes its flagship. V4.1-Flash is on Hugging Face under the MIT license, which lets companies run it on their own servers and keep data in-house.
It has a one-million-token context, reads images as well as text, and activates just 8 billion parameters for input and 16 billion for output.
No independent benchmark tests the two latest models side by side. On DeepSeek’s own tests, V4.1-Flash resolves 74.2% of DeepSWE software tasks, level with Claude Opus 5 at 74.0%.
On Terminal-Bench 4.0, a harder agent test, it scores 31.2% against Opus 5’s 51.8%.
Developer usage
Developers use DeepSeek’s weights directly. V4-Flash-0731, the July build of the model V4.1-Flash replaced, was downloaded 4.4 million times on Hugging Face in 30 days.
On OpenRouter, it processed 12.3 trillion tokens in the seven days to September 9, the fourth most of any model that week.
Doubao’s developer volume runs through ByteDance’s own cloud instead, and DeepSeek’s coding partners, WorkBuddy and OpenCode, added V4.1-Flash on release day.
Volcano Engine does not publish per-model token counts, only the 180 trillion daily total across the Doubao family.
API Pricing
DeepSeek is the cheaper API. At peak hours, DeepSeek’s price list charges ¥2 per million input tokens and ¥8 per million output tokens for V4.1-Flash. Doubao Seed 2.1 Pro costs ¥6 and ¥30 on Volcano Engine, and Seed 2.1 Turbo ¥3 and ¥15.
- DeepSeek halves prices off-peak. Peak hours are 9:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:00 Beijing time on weekdays.
- V4-Pro is staying. DeepSeek had planned to retire it on September 14, 2026, then said it would keep serving it at ¥9 and ¥27 in response to user demand. Its release note names V4.1-Pro as the next model, without a date.
- Doubao prices by input length. Seed 2.1 Pro’s rate covers inputs up to 256K tokens, and cached input costs ¥1.20.
Doubao raised its prices
Doubao’s new flagship costs more than the one it replaced. Seed 2.0 Pro still lists at ¥3.20 per million input tokens and ¥16 per million output tokens for inputs up to 32K. Seed 2.1 Pro costs ¥6 and ¥30.
Cheap models remain. Volcano Engine’s Doubao page advertises prices from ¥0.15 per million input tokens and 180 trillion tokens of daily use.
Is Doubao Free?
Yes, the Doubao app is free, and a paid Professional version launched on June 24, 2026. It runs on Doubao 2.1 Pro, adds an office mode, and comes in three monthly tiers, IT之家 reported: ¥68, ¥200 and ¥500.
The Standard tier gives more than five times the free version’s allowance for expert and office modes. Enhanced gives four times Standard, and Premium ten times Standard.
Verified university students pay ¥38 a month, and ByteDance says free users will keep getting new models. QuestMobile notes that Professional links the phone app and the PC client, so office work started on one carries on in the other.
Charging did not cost Doubao users, on QuestMobile’s count. Its app added 13.78 million users in June over May. DeepSeek’s site lists no paid plan for its app or web chat; its only published prices are for the API.
Using Doubao and DeepSeek Outside China
ByteDance built Doubao’s consumer app for mainland China. Visitors elsewhere are sent to Dola. DeepSeek runs one app, website and API worldwide, though some governments restrict it, and its open weights can be self-hosted.
For coding use, our DeepSeek for coding review goes further, and our guide to Chinese AI companies covers ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and Zhipu.
Building With Chinese Models
Second Talent matches you with pre-vetted AI and LLM engineers from nine Asian markets within 24 hours. Tell us the role.
FAQs
Who owns Doubao?
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin. Its Seed team builds the models and Volcano Engine sells them.
Is Doubao available in English?
Outside mainland China, use Dola, ByteDance’s international version.
![Is Micro1 Legit?. Is Micro1 Legit? Pay, Reviews and How It Works [2026], by Second Talent.](https://www.secondtalent.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/is-micro1-legit-featured-v2-768x403.jpg)