Move your team from Gemini to DeepSeek.
Each person gets a short interview, then a personalized step-by-step guide showing exactly where their saved work, prompts, and projects land in DeepSeek — and the few things that need a manual step, walked through. You send one invite; nobody becomes the help desk, and nothing in Gemini is changed or cancelled. Want to see where you’re paying for both first? Run the free audit.
Both tools persist conversation history server-side and provide a sidebar for navigating past chats. DeepSeek stores history across web and mobile (when signed in), with a 'Search chat content' bar to find conversations by content; users can rename and delete chats. Gemini stores history under 'Keep Activity' (Settings > Activity at gemini.google.com or myactivity.google.com/product/gemini), with a chronological sidebar, search, and the option to delete individual chats; auto-delete can be set to 3, 18, or 36 months. Neither tool provides a bulk export of conversation history, so if you want to preserve past chats before switching, manually copy important threads or use browser-save. After switching, rebuild any ongoing threads on the new platform. Gemini additionally offers a separate 'Memory' toggle (Personal Intelligence settings) that lets the model recall facts from past conversations to personalize future responses — a capability DeepSeek does not offer.
- Warning: Gemini's 'Keep Activity' is on by default for users 18+; if turned off, chats are retained for only 72 hours. DeepSeek history persists as long as the account exists. Users migrating from DeepSeek should verify Keep Activity is enabled on Gemini before assuming history is being saved.
- Warning: Gemini's history search is via myactivity.google.com (Google Account activity), not an in-app search bar like DeepSeek's 'Search chat content'. The UX is meaningfully different and requires navigating to a separate Google product.
- Warning: Gemini's history is tied to a personal Google Account and does not support work/school accounts; DeepSeek history is tied to a DeepSeek account. Neither platform allows importing or merging chat history from the other.
Both tools offer a 'go deeper' mode for complex problems, but they serve different use cases. DeepSeek's DeepThink is a reasoning toggle (available in web and mobile apps) that activates chain-of-thought thinking before the model's final answer — best for math, code debugging, logic puzzles, and multi-step analysis on a single question. Gemini's Deep Research is an agentic report-generation mode: the user states a topic, Gemini generates a research plan, browses dozens to hundreds of web pages, and produces a long-form structured report with inline citations — best for research briefs, competitive analysis, and literature reviews. To migrate a DeepThink workflow to Gemini: activate Deep Research from the prompt-bar tool menu in gemini.google.com, provide a research topic or question, review and approve the generated plan, then let Gemini run (it can take several minutes). To migrate a Deep Research workflow to DeepSeek: enable the DeepThink toggle and add web search context manually or via the Search toggle; note this produces a single-response answer rather than a structured multi-source report.
- Warning: These modes are not equivalent in scope: DeepThink produces one (possibly lengthy) answer with visible reasoning steps; Deep Research produces a structured multi-source report exportable to Google Docs. Switching tools will change the output format substantially.
- Warning: Deep Research's free-tier compute limits are not published as fixed counts since 2026 — all tiers run under Gemini's compute-based usage limits (Plus 2x, Pro 4x, Ultra 5x–20x). Heavy users of DeepThink (unlimited toggles on DeepSeek's paid tiers) may find Gemini's compute caps restrictive.
- Warning: Deep Research on Gemini can optionally browse connected Google Drive and Gmail for sources (requires Connected Apps enabled), providing richer organizational context that DeepThink cannot replicate.
Both tools accept document uploads for Q&A, summarization, and analysis. On DeepSeek, attach files via the paperclip/attachment icon in chat.deepseek.com or the mobile app; supported types include PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, CSV, and XLSX. On Gemini, attach via the file-upload button in gemini.google.com; supported types span documents, spreadsheets, audio, video, code folders, and GitHub repos (up to 10 files per prompt, 100 MB each). To migrate: re-upload your files on the destination platform — neither tool exports conversation attachments, so maintain a local copy of source documents. If you rely on a large batch of files, note Gemini supports up to 10 per prompt (or one code folder/repo), while DeepSeek sessions can hold more files but at less clearly documented limits. Gemini's paid plans (AI Plus, Pro, Ultra) offer substantially larger context windows (up to 1M tokens on AI Pro/Ultra) for processing long documents.
- Warning: DeepSeek does not officially publish per-file size caps; third-party sources report 10–100 MB per file depending on tier. Gemini publishes a clear 100 MB per-file limit (2 GB for video). If you're hitting size errors on DeepSeek and switching to Gemini, use the larger documented limit.
- Warning: Gemini's context window for document Q&A scales with plan: 32K tokens on no-plan, 128K on AI Plus, 1M on AI Pro/Ultra. DeepSeek V4 models support 1M-token context regardless of tier, which may be an advantage for free users processing very long documents.
- Warning: Gemini Drive file uploads require 'Keep Activity' to be on and Google Workspace connected — this is an extra setup step with no DeepSeek equivalent.
Both tools accept image uploads and can analyze visual content and extract text. On DeepSeek (chat.deepseek.com and mobile), upload images via the attachment icon; supported formats are JPG, PNG, and WebP. DeepSeek performs OCR for both printed and handwritten text, and answers visual-understanding questions about image content. Image generation is NOT available. On Gemini (gemini.google.com), images are handled as part of the general file-upload flow (attachment icon or drag-and-drop); Gemini accepts photos plus documents, audio, and video in the same flow. Gemini can analyze image contents, answer questions, extract text, and additionally generate and edit images via Nano Banana 2. To migrate: re-upload your images on the target platform — no cross-platform image history transfer exists. Note that Gemini's paid plans support a larger context window, enabling more images per session with richer multi-image analysis.
- Warning: DeepSeek does not support image generation — only analysis and OCR. Gemini supports image generation and editing (Nano Banana 2) in addition to understanding. If image generation is part of your workflow, Gemini is the only option of the two.
- Warning: DeepSeek's per-image size limits are not officially published; third-party sources report roughly 5–50 MB. Gemini's official limit is 100 MB per file. Verify your image sizes before migrating large-file workflows.
- Warning: Gemini handles images as part of a general multimodal file pipeline that also includes video and audio; DeepSeek's multimodal support is currently image-only (no video or audio upload in the consumer chat). This makes Gemini substantially broader for mixed-media workflows.
Both tools offer a mechanism for reusing long context across multiple interactions, but they approach it very differently. DeepSeek's context caching is an API-level feature: the platform automatically caches repeated prompt prefixes on disk, meaning API callers with a stable system prompt or long preamble pay a deeply discounted rate on repeated input tokens (cache-hit cost for V4-Flash is $0.0028/M vs $0.14/M for misses) with no code change required. Gemini's equivalent for end-users is Notebooks (the 'context grouping' feature): a notebook is a dedicated project space on gemini.google.com that holds related chats, uploaded source files, and per-notebook custom instructions so all conversations in that notebook share the same sources and context. To migrate an API caching workflow from DeepSeek to Gemini: use the Gemini API's built-in caching (not covered by this node) or organize recurring prompts under a consistent system instruction. To migrate a Notebooks-style project workflow from Gemini to DeepSeek: create a new chat per project with a consistent system-prompt preamble sent as the first message — DeepSeek API disk caching will reduce the repeat cost automatically, but there is no consumer-side 'project' grouping equivalent to Notebooks.
- Warning: These features target different audiences: DeepSeek context caching is an API/developer feature with no consumer UI; Gemini Notebooks is a consumer/prosumer product with no published per-token pricing impact. A developer migrating between APIs should compare the Gemini API's caching primitives, not the Notebooks product.
- Warning: Gemini Notebooks are currently limited to personal Google Accounts (work and school accounts not supported) and were rolling out to paid tiers (Ultra, Pro, Plus) before free users as of April 2026.
- Warning: DeepSeek caches only full prefix matches starting at token 0 with a minimum of 64 tokens; cache efficiency depends on keeping system prompts stable across requests. Developers migrating to any platform must maintain consistent prompt structure to benefit from caching.
Both tools can ground answers in live web results, but the mechanics differ. DeepSeek exposes a manual Search toggle (globe icon) in the input toolbar — users must opt in per query. Gemini's Google Search grounding is automatic: the model decides when a query needs current information and issues searches transparently, surfacing inline citations and a 'Sources and related content' panel without requiring a manual toggle. To migrate from DeepSeek: stop activating the Search toggle and simply prompt naturally; Gemini will invoke Google Search when needed. To migrate from Gemini to DeepSeek: enable the Search toggle before queries that need fresh data, or add phrasing like 'search the web for...' to signal intent. There is no data to export between the two — just replicate your prompting patterns on the new platform.
- Warning: DeepSeek's search toggle has been reported as unreliable in 2026 (sometimes not triggering a live search even when enabled), whereas Gemini's grounding is automatic but also not user-controlled, so you cannot force a search on every query.
- Warning: Gemini's web grounding is the same mechanism as the Gemini API's google_search tool, useful to know if you're migrating API integrations; DeepSeek search is consumer-only and not exposed in the official API.
- Warning: DeepSeek's Search and DeepThink toggles are independent as of V4 (April 2026); Gemini's Deep Research (multi-step agent) is a separate product from everyday web grounding — migrating a DeepSeek Search+DeepThink workflow may map better to Gemini Deep Research than to everyday web-search grounding.