Gemini 2.5 Pro vs Grok 3 Mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $1.25/$10.00. Gemini 2.5 Pro is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1350 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 70 tokens/sec. Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1340 vs 1220. Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGemini 2.5 ProGrok 3 Mini
ProviderGooglexAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$1.25$0.300
Output Price / 1M tokens$10.00$0.500
Context Window1.048576M128K
Max Output Tokens65,53616,384
Arena ELO1,3401,220
Coding ELO1,3501,200
TTFT (ms)400180
Tokens/sec70110
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Gemini 2.5 Pro

Choose Gemini 2.5 Pro when you need: 1m token context window, excellent reasoning capabilities, strong coding performance, native multimodal support. It excels at coding, reasoning, long-context, multimodal tasks. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent reasoning capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Native multimodal support

Best for:

codingreasoninglong-contextmultimodal
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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