LLMversus

GPT-4 1.5-nano vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Sep 14, 2026By LLMversusUpdated September 17, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

GPT-4.1 Nano is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.40 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1150. GPT-4.1 Nano is faster at 150 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1180. GPT-4.1 Nano offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4 1.5-nanoo4-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.100$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.400$4.40
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
32,768
Arena ELO
1,150
1,260
Coding ELO
1,160
1,270
TTFT (ms)
120
180
Tokens/sec
150
105
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use GPT-4 1.5-nano

Choose GPT-4.1 Nano when you need: ultra-low pricing, 1m context window, very fast inference, ideal for simple tasks at scale. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, high-volume 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:

  • Super cheap
  • Very fast
  • Large context

Best for:

cost-effectivefast-inference
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.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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