Claude Opus 4.6 vs o4 Mini
For professional coding and agentic, long-running workflows pick Claude Opus 4.6 — it wins more internal benchmarks for planning, creative problem solving, and safety. o4 Mini is the better value pick for schema-heavy tasks and classification, costing far less per token while matching Opus on many core capabilities.
anthropic
Claude Opus 4.6
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$5.00/MTok
Output
$25.00/MTok
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openai
o4 Mini
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$1.10/MTok
Output
$4.40/MTok
modelpicker.net
Benchmark Analysis
Across our 12-test suite, Claude Opus 4.6 wins 3 tests, o4 Mini wins 2, and 7 tests tie (so Opus holds the plurality of wins). Detailed callouts (scores are from our testing unless otherwise noted):
- Creative problem solving: Opus 5 vs o4 Mini 4 — Opus generates more non-obvious, feasible ideas in our tasks (ranks tied for 1st).
- Safety calibration: Opus 5 vs o4 Mini 1 — Opus refused/allowed appropriately in our safety probes (Opus tied for 1st on safety_calibration; o4 Mini ranks 32 of 55). This matters for user-facing assistants and compliance.
- Agentic planning: Opus 5 vs o4 Mini 4 — Opus outperforms on goal decomposition and recovery in multi-step workflows (Opus tied for 1st; o4 Mini ranks 16 of 54).
- Structured output: Opus 4 vs o4 Mini 5 — o4 Mini is stronger at JSON/schema adherence in our tests (o4 Mini tied for 1st; Opus ranked 26 of 54), so use it when strict format compliance is critical.
- Classification: Opus 3 vs o4 Mini 4 — o4 Mini is better for routing and categorization (o4 Mini tied for 1st; Opus ranked 31 of 53).
- Ties (both models scored the same in our tests): strategic_analysis (5/5), constrained_rewriting (3/3), tool_calling (5/5), faithfulness (5/5), long_context (5/5), persona_consistency (5/5), multilingual (5/5). For example, both are top-ranked on tool calling and long-context retrieval (tied for 1st across many peers), so neither concedes ground on multi-step tool workflows or >30k-token context use. External benchmarks (supplementary): Claude Opus 4.6 scores 78.7% on SWE-bench Verified (Epoch AI) and 94.4% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI), reflecting strong coding and contest math performance in third-party tests. o4 Mini scores 97.8% on MATH Level 5 (Epoch AI), showing top-tier performance on that math benchmark.
Pricing Analysis
Pricing gap is large and material at scale. Costs are per mTok: Claude Opus 4.6 input $5 / output $25; o4 Mini input $1.10 / output $4.40 (price ratio ≈5.68×). Using a simple 50/50 input-output split per 1M total tokens: Opus ≈ $15,000 per 1M tokens (500k input = $2,500; 500k output = $12,500). o4 Mini ≈ $2,750 per 1M tokens (500k input = $550; 500k output = $2,200). Scale: 10M tokens → Opus ≈ $150,000 vs o4 Mini ≈ $27,500; 100M → Opus ≈ $1,500,000 vs o4 Mini ≈ $275,000. Teams with high-volume chat, customer support, or analytics pipelines should care deeply about the gap; teams prioritizing top-tier safety/agentic behavior or heavy coding work may justify Opus’ premium.
Real-World Cost Comparison
Bottom Line
Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you need the strongest agentic planning, creative problem solving, safety calibration, and coding/long-context performance and can absorb a premium (input $5 / output $25). Choose o4 Mini if you need the best price-performance for high-volume usage, strict structured outputs, and classification tasks (input $1.10 / output $4.40) — it matches Opus on many core areas and is far cheaper at scale.
How We Test
We test every model against our 12-benchmark suite covering tool calling, agentic planning, creative problem solving, safety calibration, and more. Each test is scored 1–5 by an LLM judge. Read our full methodology.