o4-mini vs Sonar Reasoning: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare o4-mini and Sonar Reasoning across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Featureo4-miniSonar Reasoning
ProviderOpenAIPerplexity
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.500$1.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.00$5.00
Context Window
128K
127K
Max Output Tokens
32,768
8,192
Arena ELO
1,260
1,240
Coding ELO
1,270
1,235
TTFT (ms)
180
150
Tokens/sec
105
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use o4-mini

o4-mini excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding
When to Use Sonar Reasoning

Sonar Reasoning excels at reasoning, web-search tasks.

Strengths:

  • Reasoning + search
  • Fresh data
  • Good accuracy

Best for:

reasoningweb-search

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