Command R vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Command R is significantly cheaper at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1100. Command R is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1140. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureCommand Ro3-mini
ProviderCohereOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$4.40
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
65,536
Arena ELO
1,140
1,280
Coding ELO
1,100
1,285
TTFT (ms)
250
350
Tokens/sec
85
25
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionNoNo
When to Use Command R

Choose Command R when you need: very affordable pricing, good rag and grounding capabilities, strong multilingual support, 128k context window. It excels at rag, chatbots, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Good RAG and grounding capabilities
  • Strong multilingual support
  • 128K context window

Best for:

ragchatbotscost-sensitivemultilingual
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. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Strong reasoning
  • Good math skills
  • Affordable reasoning

Best for:

reasoningmathgeneral-purpose

Frequently Asked Questions

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