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

Verdict

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1220.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3Grok 3 Mini
ProviderxAIxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.300
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.500
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,38416,384
Arena ELO1,3001,220
Coding ELO1,2901,200
TTFT (ms)300180
Tokens/sec80110
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding
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

Frequently Asked Questions

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