Grok 3-mini vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

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

⚡ Quick Answer

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 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

FeatureGrok 3-minio3-mini
ProviderxAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$4.40
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
65,536
Arena ELO
1,175
1,280
Coding ELO
1,190
1,285
TTFT (ms)
130
350
Tokens/sec
140
25
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionNoNo
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Fast
  • Large context

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose
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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