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

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

⚡ Quick Answer

o3-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $2.50/$10.00. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1265. GPT-4o is faster at 95 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1260. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4oo3-mini
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.50$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$10.00$4.40
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
16,384
65,536
Arena ELO
1,260
1,280
Coding ELO
1,265
1,285
TTFT (ms)
230
350
Tokens/sec
95
25
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4o

Choose GPT-4o when you need: fast response times, strong multimodal capabilities, code execution support. It excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. 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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