R1 vs o3

Overview (our tests): o3 wins 4 benchmarks, R1 wins 1, and 7 are ties. Detailed walk-through: 1) Tool calling: o3 scores 5 vs R1 4; o3 ranks tied for 1st (rank 1 of 54, tied with 16), while R1 ranks 18 of 54. This means o3 is more reliable at function selection, argument accuracy and sequencing for agentic workflows. 2) Structured output: o3 5 vs R1 4 — o3 is tied for 1st in structured output (rank 1 of 54), while R1 sits mid-pack (rank 26 of 54). Use o3 when strict JSON/schema compliance matters. 3) Classification: o3 3 vs R1 2 — o3 (rank 31 of 53) is clearly better at routing and categorization; R1 ranks 51 of 53. 4) Agentic planning: o3 5 vs R1 4 — o3 is tied for 1st (rank 1 of 54), making it stronger at goal decomposition and failure recovery. 5) Creative problem solving: R1 5 vs o3 4 — R1 wins here and ties for 1st on creative tasks in our testing; pick R1 when you need non-obvious, feasible ideas. 6) Ties: strategic analysis (both 5, tied for 1st), constrained rewriting (both 4, rank 6), faithfulness (both 5, tied for 1st), long context (both 4, rank 38), safety calibration (both 1), persona consistency (both 5, tied for 1st), multilingual (both 5, tied for 1st). These ties show comparable performance on many general-purpose capabilities. External benchmarks (Epoch AI): on MATH Level 5, o3 scores 97.8% vs R1 93.1% (o3 ranks 2 of 14, R1 ranks 8 of 14); on AIME 2025, o3 scores 83.9% vs R1 53.3% (o3 ranks 12 of 23, R1 ranks 17 of 23); on SWE-bench Verified (Epoch AI) o3 scores 62.3% (rank 9 of 12) while R1 has no SWE-bench entry in the payload. These external numbers corroborate o3's advantage on technical/math and coding-related tasks.

Per-token pricing from the payload: R1 charges $0.7 input / $2.5 output per mtok; o3 charges $2 input / $8 output per mtok. Using a 50/50 split of input vs output tokens as an example: for 1M total tokens (500k input + 500k output) R1 costs $1,600 (0.7500 + 2.5500) while o3 costs $5,000 (2500 + 8500). At 10M tokens those totals scale to R1 $16,000 vs o3 $50,000; at 100M tokens R1 $160,000 vs o3 $500,000. The gap is meaningful for high-volume production: at 10M+ tokens/month engineering teams, chat services, or SaaS vendors will pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars less with R1. Single-user or low-volume projects (<1M tokens/mo) may prioritize o3's extra capabilities despite the higher spend.

Choose R1 if: you’re cost-sensitive at scale (R1 is ~31% of o3's per-token cost) or you prioritize creative problem solving and strong single-model math (R1 scores 93.1% on MATH Level 5 in our data). Choose o3 if: you need best-in-class tool calling, structured output, agentic planning, multimodal inputs (o3 supports text+image+file→text), or the highest math/coding accuracy (o3: 97.8% on MATH Level 5, 62.3% on SWE-bench Verified). If you expect to process 10M+ tokens/month and must minimize cloud costs, R1 is the practical choice; if strict schema adherence, function accuracy, or multimodality are primary, o3 is worth the premium.