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Claude Opus 4 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1330.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4o4-mini
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$4.40
Context Window200K200K
Max Output Tokens32,000100,000
Arena ELO1,3301,350
Coding ELO1,3601,380
TTFT (ms)5001,200
Tokens/sec5060
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
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.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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