Claude Haiku 4 vs GPT-4.1 Mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

GPT-4.1 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.40/$1.60 per million tokens vs $0.80/$4.00. GPT-4.1 Mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1230 vs 1195. GPT-4.1 Mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1240 vs 1220. GPT-4.1 Mini offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Haiku 4GPT-4.1 Mini
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$1.00$0.400
Output Price / 1M tokens$5.00$1.60
Context Window200K1.047576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,2201,240
Coding ELO1,1951,230
TTFT (ms)150190
Tokens/sec130115
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use Claude Haiku 4

Choose Claude Haiku 4 when you need: very fast response times, 200k context window, affordable for anthropic quality, good instruction following. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, high-volume tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very fast response times
  • 200K context window
  • Affordable for Anthropic quality
  • Good instruction following

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivehigh-volume
When to Use GPT-4.1 Mini

Choose GPT-4.1 Mini when you need: 1m token context window at low cost, great balance of speed and quality, strong coding for a mini model, affordable for high-volume use. It excels at chatbots, long-context, cost-sensitive tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window at low cost
  • Great balance of speed and quality
  • Strong coding for a mini model
  • Affordable for high-volume use

Best for:

chatbotslong-contextcost-sensitive

Frequently Asked Questions

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