Grok 3 Mini vs Llama 4 Maverick: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1280 vs 1200. Llama 4 Maverick ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1290 vs 1220. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3 MiniLlama 4 Maverick
ProviderxAIMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$0.200
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$0.600
Context Window128K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens16,38432,768
Arena ELO1,2201,290
Coding ELO1,2001,280
TTFT (ms)180250
Tokens/sec11090
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
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.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Good for simple tasks
  • Reasoning capabilities at low cost

Best for:

chatbotscost-sensitivelightweight-tasks
When to Use Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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