Grok 3 Mini vs Llama 4 Scout: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Scout is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.30/$0.50. Llama 4 Scout is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1230 vs 1200. Llama 4 Scout ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1250 vs 1220. Llama 4 Scout offers a larger 10486K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3 MiniLlama 4 Scout
ProviderxAIMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$0.080
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$0.300
Context Window128K10.48576M
Max Output Tokens16,38432,768
Arena ELO1,2201,250
Coding ELO1,2001,230
TTFT (ms)180200
Tokens/sec110110
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
When to Use Grok 3 Mini

Choose Grok 3 Mini when you need: very affordable pricing, fast response times, good for simple tasks, reasoning capabilities at low cost. It excels at chatbots, cost-sensitive, lightweight-tasks tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Good for simple tasks
  • Reasoning capabilities at low cost

Best for:

chatbotscost-sensitivelightweight-tasks
When to Use Llama 4 Scout

Choose Llama 4 Scout when you need: 10m token context window, very affordable, open-source and self-hostable, good general performance. It excels at long-context, chatbots, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 10486K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 10M token context window
  • Very affordable
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Good general performance

Best for:

long-contextchatbotscost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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