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Grok 3 Mini vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 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

FeatureGrok 3 Minio3-mini
ProviderxAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens16,384100,000
Arena ELO1,2201,310
Coding ELO1,2001,340
TTFT (ms)1801,500
Tokens/sec11055
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

chatbotscost-sensitivelightweight-tasks
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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