LV
LLMversus

Grok 3 Mini vs o4-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. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1220. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3 Minio4-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 ELO1,2201,350
Coding ELO1,2001,380
TTFT (ms)1801,200
Tokens/sec11060
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. 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 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. 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

Related Comparisons

Gemini 2 5 Pro vs o4-miniClaude Opus 4 vs o4-miniDeepseek R1 vs o4-miniO3 Mini vs o4-miniGrok 3 vs o4-miniGpt 4 1 vs o4-miniLlama 4 Maverick vs o4-miniClaude Sonnet 4 vs o4-miniDeepseek V3 vs o4-miniGemini 2 0 Flash vs o4-miniGpt 4o vs o4-minio4-mini vs Qwen 2 5 MaxLlama 4 Scout vs o4-miniMistral Large vs o4-miniGpt 4 1 Mini vs o4-miniClaude Haiku 4 vs o4-miniGpt 4o Mini vs o4-miniCommand R Plus vs o4-miniGemini 2 0 Flash Lite vs o4-miniMistral Small vs o4-mini