Claude Opus 4 vs Grok 3 Mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. Claude Opus 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1360 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1220. Claude Opus 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4Grok 3 Mini
ProviderAnthropicxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.300
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$0.500
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens32,00016,384
Arena ELO1,3301,220
Coding ELO1,3601,200
TTFT (ms)500180
Tokens/sec50110
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Choose Claude Opus 4 when you need: top-tier coding and reasoning, excellent agentic capabilities, strong instruction following, 200k context window. It excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use Grok 3 Mini

Choose Grok 3 Mini when you need: very affordable pricing, fast response times, good for simple tasks, reasoning capabilities at low cost. It excels at chatbots, cost-sensitive, lightweight-tasks tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Good for simple tasks
  • Reasoning capabilities at low cost

Best for:

chatbotscost-sensitivelightweight-tasks

Frequently Asked Questions

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