Llama 4 Scout vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Scout is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1230. Llama 4 Scout is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1250. Llama 4 Scout offers a larger 10486K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureLlama 4 Scouto4-mini
ProviderMetaOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.100$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.300$4.40
Context Window10.48576M200K
Max Output Tokens32,768100,000
Arena ELO1,2501,350
Coding ELO1,2301,380
TTFT (ms)2001,200
Tokens/sec11060
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use Llama 4 Scout

Choose Llama 4 Scout when you need: 10m token context window, very affordable, open-source and self-hostable, good general performance. It excels at long-context, chatbots, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 10486K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 10M token context window
  • Very affordable
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Good general performance

Best for:

long-contextchatbotscost-sensitiveopen-source
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.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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