Command R vs o4-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. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1100. Command R is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1140. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureCommand Ro4-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
32,768
Arena ELO
1,140
1,260
Coding ELO
1,100
1,270
TTFT (ms)
250
180
Tokens/sec
85
105
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
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 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. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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