GPT-4 1 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

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

⚡ Quick Answer

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1320. GPT-4.1 is faster at 88 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1290. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4 1o4-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$8.00$4.40
Context Window
8.192K
128K
Max Output Tokens
2,048
32,768
Arena ELO
1,200
1,260
Coding ELO
1,210
1,270
TTFT (ms)
160
180
Tokens/sec
85
105
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use GPT-4 1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Good quality
  • Affordable
  • Reliable

Best for:

general-purposecoding
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

Related Comparisons