GPT-4o Mini vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

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

⚡ Quick Answer

GPT-4o Mini 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 1200. GPT-4o Mini is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1220. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4o Minio3-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$4.40
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
16,384
65,536
Arena ELO
1,220
1,280
Coding ELO
1,200
1,285
TTFT (ms)
180
350
Tokens/sec
120
25
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4o Mini

Choose GPT-4o Mini when you need: extremely affordable pricing, fast response times, strong for its price tier, good multimodal support. It excels at chatbots, lightweight-tasks, cost-sensitive tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Extremely affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Strong for its price tier
  • Good multimodal support

Best for:

chatbotslightweight-taskscost-sensitive
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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