Which is cheaper, Grok 3 or o4-mini?

o4-mini is cheaper for both input ($1.10/M tokens) and output ($4.40/M tokens), compared to Grok 3 at $3.00/$15.00 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Grok 3 or o4-mini?

Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 300ms, compared to o4-mini at 60 tokens/sec and 1200ms TTFT.

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

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

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

o4-mini has a higher coding ELO of 1380 compared to Grok 3's 1290, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

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

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

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

⚡ Quick Answer

o4-mini is significantly cheaper at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1290. Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1300. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Grok 3	o4-mini
Provider	xAI	OpenAI
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	32,768
Arena ELO	1,285	1,260
Coding ELO	1,280	1,270
TTFT (ms)	200	180
Tokens/sec	90	105
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
Vision	No	No

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 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. 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:

Affordable
Fast
Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

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

Side-by-Side Comparison

Frequently Asked Questions

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