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GPT-4.1 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1320. GPT-4.1 is faster at 88 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1290. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4.1o4-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$8.00$4.40
Context Window1.047576M200K
Max Output Tokens32,768100,000
Arena ELO1,2901,350
Coding ELO1,3201,380
TTFT (ms)2601,200
Tokens/sec8860
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use GPT-4.1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent coding performance
  • Strong instruction following
  • Competitive pricing for its capability

Best for:

codinglong-contextagentsgeneral-purpose
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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