Command R vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Command R is significantly cheaper at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1100. Command R is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1140. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureCommand Ro3-mini
ProviderCohereOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens4,096100,000
Arena ELO1,1401,310
Coding ELO1,1001,340
TTFT (ms)2501,500
Tokens/sec8555
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Command R

Choose Command R when you need: very affordable pricing, good rag and grounding capabilities, strong multilingual support, 128k context window. It excels at rag, chatbots, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Good RAG and grounding capabilities
  • Strong multilingual support
  • 128K context window

Best for:

ragchatbotscost-sensitivemultilingual
When to Use o3-mini

Choose o3-mini when you need: strong mathematical reasoning, good coding performance, affordable reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Strong mathematical reasoning
  • Good coding performance
  • Affordable reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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