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Claude Sonnet 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 $3.00/$15.00. Claude Sonnet 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1305 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 78 tokens/sec. Claude Sonnet 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1280 vs 1220. Claude Sonnet 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4Grok 3 Mini
ProviderAnthropicxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.300
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.500
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens64,00016,384
Arena ELO1,2801,220
Coding ELO1,3051,200
TTFT (ms)320180
Tokens/sec78110
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Sonnet 4

Choose Claude Sonnet 4 when you need: best-in-class coding performance, 200k context window, excellent instruction following. It excels at coding, analysis, long-context, agents tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Best-in-class coding performance
  • 200K context window
  • Excellent instruction following

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents
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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