Which is cheaper, Grok 3 Mini or o4-mini?

Grok 3 Mini is cheaper for both input ($0.30/M tokens) and output ($0.50/M tokens), compared to o4-mini at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Grok 3 Mini or o4-mini?

Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 180ms, compared to o4-mini at 60 tokens/sec and 1200ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, Grok 3 Mini or o4-mini?

o4-mini has a 200K token context window, which is larger Grok 3 Mini's 128K context window.

Which is better for coding, Grok 3 Mini or o4-mini?

o4-mini has a higher coding ELO of 1380 compared to Grok 3 Mini's 1200, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

Grok 3-mini vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: Grok 3-mini vs o4-mini — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Sep 14, 2026By LLMversusUpdated September 17, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Grok 3 Mini is significantly cheaper at $0.30/$0.50 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1220. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Grok 3-mini	o4-mini
Provider	xAI	OpenAI
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	32,768
Arena ELO	1,175	1,260
Coding ELO	1,190	1,270
TTFT (ms)	130	180
Tokens/sec	140	105
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
Vision	No	No

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 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. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

Affordable
Fast
Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Grok 3-mini vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

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