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

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

⚡ Quick Answer

o3-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1290. Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3o3-mini
ProviderxAIOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$4.40
Context Window
200K
128K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
65,536
Arena ELO
1,285
1,280
Coding ELO
1,280
1,285
TTFT (ms)
200
350
Tokens/sec
90
25
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
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 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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. 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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