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Grok 3 vs Phi-4: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Phi-4 is significantly cheaper at $0.07/$0.14 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1130. Phi-4 is faster at 160 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1150. Grok 3 offers a larger 128K context window vs 16K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3Phi-4
ProviderxAIMicrosoft
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.070
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.140
Context Window128K16.384K
Max Output Tokens16,3844,096
Arena ELO1,3001,150
Coding ELO1,2901,130
TTFT (ms)300100
Tokens/sec80160
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
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. Its 128K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding
When to Use Phi-4

Choose Phi-4 when you need: ultra-low cost for a capable model, strong math for its size (14b params), very fast inference, can run on consumer hardware. It excels at cost-sensitive, edge-deployment, math, lightweight-tasks tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Ultra-low cost for a capable model
  • Strong math for its size (14B params)
  • Very fast inference
  • Can run on consumer hardware

Best for:

cost-sensitiveedge-deploymentmathlightweight-tasks

Frequently Asked Questions

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