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Phi-3 Medium vs Sonar Reasoning: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare Phi-3 Medium and Sonar Reasoning across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeaturePhi-3 MediumSonar Reasoning
ProviderMicrosoftPerplexity
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.170$1.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.170$5.00
Context Window
128K
127K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
8,192
Arena ELO
1,170
1,240
Coding ELO
1,175
1,235
TTFT (ms)
150
150
Tokens/sec
100
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Phi-3 Medium

Phi-3 Medium excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good instruction following

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

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