GPT-5.4 Nano vs Grok 3
For most production and high-volume apps pick GPT-5.4 Nano: it matches or ties Grok 3 across half the suite while costing far less. Pick Grok 3 when faithfulness, classification, or agentic planning are critical — it wins those tests in our benchmarks but at a much higher price.
openai
GPT-5.4 Nano
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$0.200/MTok
Output
$1.25/MTok
modelpicker.net
xai
Grok 3
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$3.00/MTok
Output
$15.00/MTok
modelpicker.net
Benchmark Analysis
Summary of our 12-test suite: ties dominate (6 ties), with GPT-5.4 Nano winning 3 tests and Grok 3 winning 3. Ties: structured output (both 5) — both models rank tied for 1st on JSON/schema adherence; strategic analysis (both 5) — tied for 1st, so both handle nuanced tradeoffs; tool calling (both 4) — both rank 18 of 54 (capable but not elite for function selection); long context (both 5) — tied for 1st, but GPT-5.4 Nano has a 400,000 token window vs Grok 3’s 131,072, favoring Nano for extremely large documents; persona consistency and multilingual (both 5) — both tied for 1st, meaning equivalent behavior for character and non-English tasks. GPT-5.4 Nano wins constrained rewriting (4 vs 3) — ranks 6th vs Grok’s 31st, so Nano is better at tight compression and hard limits. Nano also wins creative problem solving (4 vs 3) — rank 9 vs 30, meaning stronger idea generation. Nano wins safety calibration (3 vs 2) — rank 10 vs 12, so Nano refuses harmful requests more reliably in our tests. Grok 3 wins faithfulness (5 vs 4) — tied for 1st vs GPT rank 34, making Grok the better choice when strict adherence to source material matters. Grok also wins classification (4 vs 3) — tied for 1st vs GPT rank 31, so Grok is stronger at routing/labeling. Finally Grok wins agentic planning (5 vs 4) — tied for 1st vs GPT rank 16, meaning Grok produces more robust goal decomposition and recovery. External benchmark note: GPT-5.4 Nano scores 87.8% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI) in our data, indicating strong math/competition performance; Grok 3 has no AIME value in the payload.
Pricing Analysis
Pricing gap is large. Costs per 1,000 tokens: GPT-5.4 Nano input $0.20, output $1.25; Grok 3 input $3.00, output $15.00. Assuming a 50/50 split of input/output tokens: monthly costs for 1M tokens (500k in / 500k out) are $725 for GPT-5.4 Nano vs $9,000 for Grok 3. At 10M tokens: $7,250 vs $90,000. At 100M tokens: $72,500 vs $900,000. That means Nano costs ~8.33% of Grok 3 (priceRatio 0.08333). Teams with large traffic, chatbots, or document pipelines should care deeply about this gap; organizations needing higher fidelity on classification/faithfulness may accept Grok 3’s ~12x–14x higher bill for those specific gains.
Real-World Cost Comparison
Bottom Line
Choose GPT-5.4 Nano if you need cost-efficient, large-context processing, better creative problem solving, tighter constrained rewriting, or strong math performance (AIME 2025: 87.8% per Epoch AI). Its 400k token window and far lower per-token price make it ideal for high-volume apps. Choose Grok 3 if your priority is impeccable faithfulness, top-tier classification, or agentic planning and you can justify much higher costs for those specific gains.
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.