LLMversus

Grok 3 vs Grok 3-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 $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1200. Grok 3 Mini is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1220.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3Grok 3-mini
ProviderxAIxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.300
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.500
Context Window
200K
128K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
4,096
Arena ELO
1,285
1,175
Coding ELO
1,280
1,190
TTFT (ms)
200
130
Tokens/sec
90
140
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Latest xAI model
  • Strong reasoning
  • Large context

Best for:

general-purposecodingreasoning
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

Frequently Asked Questions

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