GPT-5.4 vs Grok 3 Mini

Wins and ties (our 12-test suite): GPT-5.4 wins structured output (5 vs 4), strategic analysis (5 vs 3), creative problem solving (4 vs 3), safety calibration (5 vs 2), agentic planning (5 vs 3) and multilingual (5 vs 4). Grok 3 Mini wins tool calling (5 vs 4) and classification (4 vs 3). They tie on constrained rewriting (4/4), faithfulness (5/5), long context (5/5) and persona consistency (5/5). What that means in practice: GPT-5.4’s 5/5 in safety calibration and agentic planning (ranked tied for 1st in those categories) signals stronger refusal behavior and more reliable goal decomposition/failure recovery for agentic workflows. Its structured output 5/5 (tied for 1st) indicates better JSON/schema compliance for production integrations. GPT-5.4 also ranks at the top on long context and faithfulness, and scores 76.9% on SWE-bench Verified and 95.3% on AIME 2025 (both from Epoch AI), supporting stronger performance on coding and advanced math tasks in external benchmarks. Grok 3 Mini’s 5/5 tool calling (tied for 1st) and 4/4 classification (tied for 1st) show it excels at picking functions, argument accuracy, sequencing, and routing/classification tasks. Both models score 5/5 on long context in our tests, but GPT-5.4 offers a much larger context window (1,050,000 tokens vs Grok’s 131,072), which matters for single-document retrieval and multi-GB transcripts. In short: GPT-5.4 trades materially higher cost for stronger performance across planning, safety, strategic reasoning, multilingual output, and external coding/math benchmarks; Grok 3 Mini is the cheaper tool-calling and classification specialist.

Payload prices: GPT-5.4 input $2.50 /M tokens, output $15.00 /M tokens; Grok 3 Mini input $0.30 /M, output $0.50 /M. Using a 50/50 input-output split as a simple baseline: per 1M total tokens GPT-5.4 costs $8.75 (0.5M×$2.50 + 0.5M×$15.00), Grok 3 Mini costs $0.40 (0.5M×$0.30 + 0.5M×$0.50). At 10M tokens/month that scales to $87.50 vs $4.00; at 100M tokens/month to $875 vs $40. If your workload is mostly outputs (e.g., long generated responses), GPT-5.4 is $15/M vs Grok $0.50/M. Enterprises and high-throughput apps should account for that gap — at 100M output tokens/month the difference is $1,500 vs $50 per month. Startups, hobbyists, or very high-volume pipelines will care most about Grok’s lower rates; teams prioritizing safety, advanced planning, and top-tier strategic/multilingual quality may accept GPT-5.4’s higher cost.

Choose GPT-5.4 if you need highest-quality planning, safety, strategic analysis, multilingual capabilities, schema-compliant structured outputs, or best-in-class performance on SWE-bench Verified (76.9%) and AIME 2025 (95.3%, Epoch AI) — and you can absorb higher per-token costs. Choose Grok 3 Mini if you need the best tool-calling and classification performance at minimal cost (input $0.30/M, output $0.50/M), or you operate at very high token volumes where the ~30x output-price gap makes GPT-5.4 uneconomic.