LLMversus

Claude Sonnet 4 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Aug 10, 2026By LLMversusUpdated August 11, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1305. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1280.

Updated: August 10, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4o4-mini
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$4.40
Context Window
200K
128K
Max Output Tokens
64,000
32,768
Arena ELO
1,472
1,260
Coding ELO
1,472
1,270
TTFT (ms)
320
180
Tokens/sec
78
105
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Sonnet 4

Choose Claude Sonnet 4 when you need: best-in-class coding performance, 200k context window, excellent instruction following. It excels at coding, analysis, long-context, agents tasks.

Strengths:

  • Best-in-class coding performance
  • 200K context window
  • Excellent instruction following

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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