GPT-3.5 Turbo vs GPT-4o: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-3.5 TurboGPT-4o
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.500$2.50
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.50$10.00
Context Window
16K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
16,384
Arena ELO
1,120
1,260
Coding ELO
1,100
1,265
TTFT (ms)
150
230
Tokens/sec
100
95
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
When to Use GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Fast
  • Widely used

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose
When to Use GPT-4o

GPT-4o excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

  • Fast response times
  • Strong multimodal capabilities
  • Code execution support

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling

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