LLMversus

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

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

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare Grok 3-mini and Sonar Reasoning across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3-miniSonar Reasoning
ProviderxAIPerplexity
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$8.00
Context Window
128K
127K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
8,192
Arena ELO
1,175
1,240
Coding ELO
1,190
1,235
TTFT (ms)
130
150
Tokens/sec
140
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Grok 3-mini

Grok 3-mini excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Fast
  • Large context

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose
When to Use Sonar Reasoning

Sonar Reasoning excels at reasoning, web-search tasks.

Strengths:

  • Reasoning + search
  • Fresh data
  • Good accuracy

Best for:

reasoningweb-search

Related Comparisons

Claude Opus 4 vs Sonar ReasoningClaude Opus 4 vs Grok 3-miniClaude Sonnet 4 vs Sonar ReasoningClaude Sonnet 4 vs Grok 3-miniGemini 2 5 Pro vs Sonar ReasoningGemini 2 5 Pro vs Grok 3-miniClaude Haiku 4 vs Sonar ReasoningClaude Haiku 4 vs Grok 3-miniDeepseek R1 vs Sonar ReasoningDeepseek R1 vs Grok 3-miniQwen 2 5 Max vs Sonar ReasoningGrok 3-mini vs Qwen 2 5 MaxGemini 2 0 Flash vs Sonar ReasoningGemini 2 0 Flash vs Grok 3-miniDeepseek V3 vs Sonar ReasoningDeepseek V3 vs Grok 3-miniO3 Mini vs Sonar ReasoningGrok 3-mini vs O3 MiniO3 vs Sonar ReasoningGrok 3-mini vs O3