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

Verdict

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1305. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1280.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4o4-mini
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$4.40
Context Window200K200K
Max Output Tokens64,000100,000
Arena ELO1,2801,350
Coding ELO1,3051,380
TTFT (ms)3201,200
Tokens/sec7860
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
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.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents
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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