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GPT-4o Mini vs Grok 3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

GPT-4o Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1200. GPT-4o Mini is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1220.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4o MiniGrok 3
ProviderOpenAIxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$15.00
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,38416,384
Arena ELO1,2201,300
Coding ELO1,2001,290
TTFT (ms)180300
Tokens/sec12080
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use GPT-4o Mini

Choose GPT-4o Mini when you need: extremely affordable pricing, fast response times, strong for its price tier, good multimodal support. It excels at chatbots, lightweight-tasks, cost-sensitive tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Extremely affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Strong for its price tier
  • Good multimodal support

Best for:

chatbotslightweight-taskscost-sensitive
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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