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GPT-4o Mini vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

GPT-4o Mini 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 1200. GPT-4o Mini is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1220. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4o Minio3-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens16,384100,000
Arena ELO1,2201,310
Coding ELO1,2001,340
TTFT (ms)1801,500
Tokens/sec12055
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
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 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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