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Llama 4 Maverick vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick is significantly cheaper at $0.20/$0.60 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1280. Llama 4 Maverick is faster at 90 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1290. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureLlama 4 Mavericko3-mini
ProviderMetaOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.200$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$4.40
Context Window1.048576M200K
Max Output Tokens32,768100,000
Arena ELO1,2901,310
Coding ELO1,2801,340
TTFT (ms)2501,500
Tokens/sec9055
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source
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.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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