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GPT-4o vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $2.50/$10.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1265. GPT-4o is faster at 95 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1260. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4oo4-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.50$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$10.00$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens16,384100,000
Arena ELO1,2601,350
Coding ELO1,2651,380
TTFT (ms)2301,200
Tokens/sec9560
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use GPT-4o

Choose GPT-4o when you need: fast response times, strong multimodal capabilities, code execution support. It excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

  • Fast response times
  • Strong multimodal capabilities
  • Code execution support

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling
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. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

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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