R1 vs Grok 3 Mini

Summary of head-to-heads in our 12-test suite (scores shown are from our testing unless otherwise noted):

• Strategic analysis: R1 5 vs Grok 3 Mini 3 — R1 wins. R1 is tied for 1st in our ranking cluster ("tied for 1st with 25 other models") which means it handles nuanced tradeoffs and numeric reasoning better for planning and analysis tasks.
• Creative problem solving: R1 5 vs Grok 3 Mini 3 — R1 wins and ranks tied for 1st, so it produces more non-obvious, feasible idea-generation in our prompts.
• Agentic planning: R1 4 vs Grok 3 Mini 3 — R1 wins; its ranking (rank 16 of 54) indicates stronger goal decomposition and failure recovery.
• Multilingual: R1 5 vs Grok 3 Mini 4 — R1 wins and is tied for 1st (many models share top score), so expect better parity across non-English outputs in our tests.
• Tool calling: R1 4 vs Grok 3 Mini 5 — Grok 3 Mini wins and is tied for 1st on tool_calling; in practice Grok selects functions, arguments, and sequencing more reliably in our tool-invocation scenarios.
• Classification: R1 2 vs Grok 3 Mini 4 — Grok wins (tied for 1st among many models), so routing and categorization tasks favor Grok in our tests.
• Long context: R1 4 vs Grok 3 Mini 5 — Grok wins and is tied for 1st on long_context; for retrieval or 30K+ token tasks Grok retained more accurate context in our trials.
• Safety calibration: R1 1 vs Grok 3 Mini 2 — Grok edges R1 on refusing harmful requests while permitting legitimate ones in our tests (Grok ranks 12 of 55 vs R1 at 32 of 55).
• Structured output: tie R1 4 vs Grok 3 Mini 4 — both match JSON/schema needs equally in our format-compliance tests (ranked mid-field, tied in our suite).
• Constrained rewriting: tie 4 vs 4 — both perform similarly on tight-character compression tasks.
• Faithfulness: tie 5 vs 5 — both top out in sticking to source material in our evaluations (tied for 1st among many models).
• Persona consistency: tie 5 vs 5 — both maintain character and resist prompt injection comparably (both tied for 1st with many models). External math benchmarks (supplementary, Epoch AI): R1 scores 93.1% on MATH Level 5 (Epoch AI) and 53.3% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI) — these external marks explain R1’s advantage on math-heavy and competition-style problems. Overall win/tie count in our suite: R1 wins 4 tests, Grok 3 Mini wins 4 tests, and 4 tests are ties — no clear majority winner across the full suite.

Pricing (payload per_mTok rates converted to per 1M tokens by multiplying per_mTok × 1,000): R1 input $0.7 → $700 per 1M tokens; R1 output $2.5 → $2,500 per 1M tokens. Grok 3 Mini input $0.3 → $300 per 1M; Grok output $0.5 → $500 per 1M. Example (50/50 input/output split): per 1M tokens R1 ≈ $1,600 vs Grok 3 Mini ≈ $400. At scale: 10M tokens/month → R1 ≈ $16,000 vs Grok ≈ $4,000; 100M → R1 ≈ $160,000 vs Grok ≈ $40,000. Who should care: product teams and startups with high-volume APIs will see a 4× cost delta at typical I/O mixes; research or premium apps that need R1’s higher strategic, creative, multilingual, or math performance may justify the extra $1,200 per 1M tokens (50/50).

Choose R1 if: you need best-in-class strategic analysis, creative problem solving, multilingual parity, or math performance (R1 scored 93.1% on MATH Level 5, Epoch AI), and you can absorb a much higher per-token bill (R1 output $2.5/mTok vs Grok $0.5/mTok). Choose Grok 3 Mini if: you need a cost-efficient, high-throughput assistant or API that excels at tool calling, classification, long-context retrieval, and safer refusals in our tests — it delivers similar faithfulness, structured output, and persona consistency but at roughly one-quarter the operational cost in a 50/50 I/O mix.