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

Verdict

o3-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1290. Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3o3-mini
ProviderxAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens16,384100,000
Arena ELO1,3001,310
Coding ELO1,2901,340
TTFT (ms)3001,500
Tokens/sec8055
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 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. 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:

  • Strong mathematical reasoning
  • Good coding performance
  • Affordable reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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