Grok 3 Mini vs o4 Mini

Across our 12-test internal benchmark suite, o4 Mini wins 5 categories, Grok 3 Mini wins 2, and the two tie on 5.

Where o4 Mini leads:

• Strategic analysis: o4 Mini scores 5/5 (tied for 1st of 54 models) vs Grok 3 Mini's 3/5 (rank 36 of 54). This is the largest gap — two full points — and it matters for nuanced tradeoff reasoning and business analysis tasks.
• Structured output: o4 Mini scores 5/5 (tied for 1st of 54) vs Grok 3 Mini's 4/5 (rank 26 of 54). For JSON schema compliance in production APIs, o4 Mini is more reliable.
• Creative problem-solving: o4 Mini scores 4/5 (rank 9 of 54) vs Grok 3 Mini's 3/5 (rank 30 of 54). A meaningful gap for generating non-obvious, specific solutions.
• Agentic planning: o4 Mini scores 4/5 (rank 16 of 54) vs Grok 3 Mini's 3/5 (rank 42 of 54). For goal decomposition and multi-step task recovery, o4 Mini is substantially better.
• Multilingual: o4 Mini scores 5/5 (tied for 1st of 55) vs Grok 3 Mini's 4/5 (rank 36 of 55). If you're serving non-English users, o4 Mini is the safer pick.

Where Grok 3 Mini leads:

• Safety calibration: Grok 3 Mini scores 2/5 (rank 12 of 55) vs o4 Mini's 1/5 (rank 32 of 55). Neither model excels here — the median across 55 models is 2/5 — but Grok 3 Mini is measurably better at refusing harmful requests while permitting legitimate ones.
• Constrained rewriting: Grok 3 Mini scores 4/5 (rank 6 of 53) vs o4 Mini's 3/5 (rank 31 of 53). For tasks requiring compression within hard character limits, Grok 3 Mini is the better tool.

Where they tie (5 categories): Tool calling, faithfulness, classification, long context, and persona consistency are all tied. Both score 5/5 on tool calling (tied for 1st of 54), faithfulness (tied for 1st of 55), and long context (tied for 1st of 55). Both score 4/5 on classification and 5/5 on persona consistency. These are strong shared capabilities — neither model gives up anything material here.

External benchmarks (Epoch AI): Only o4 Mini has external benchmark data in the payload. It scores 97.8% on MATH Level 5, ranking 2nd of 14 models tested (tied with 2 others), and 81.7% on AIME 2025, ranking 13th of 23 models. The MATH Level 5 score is exceptional — above the 75th percentile threshold of 97.5% across models with data. The AIME 2025 score is near the median (83.9% median across models with data). Grok 3 Mini has no external benchmark data in the payload, so direct comparison on these math olympiad tasks isn't possible from available data.

Grok 3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. o4 Mini costs $1.10/M input and $4.40/M output — roughly 3.7x more expensive on input and 8.8x more expensive on output. In practice, output cost dominates for most workloads. At 1M output tokens/month, you're paying $500 for Grok 3 Mini vs $4,400 for o4 Mini — a $3,900 monthly difference. At 10M tokens, that gap becomes $39,000/month; at 100M tokens, $390,000/month. For consumer apps, chatbots, or classification pipelines running at scale, that cost difference is decisive. For enterprise workflows where strategic analysis and structured output quality directly affect business outcomes, the premium for o4 Mini may be justified. Developers building agentic systems should also weigh the fact that o4 Mini enforces a minimum of 1,000 completion tokens and needs high max completion tokens configured — which can inflate costs further on short tasks.

Choose Grok 3 Mini if: you're running high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads (the 8.8x output cost difference compounds fast); your pipeline prioritizes tool calling, faithfulness, or long-context retrieval (tied with o4 Mini on all three); you need constrained rewriting or tighter safety calibration; or you want access to raw reasoning traces via the include_reasoning parameter at minimal cost.

Choose o4 Mini if: your work involves deep strategic analysis, complex agentic planning, or structured JSON output where quality directly drives outcomes; you need multimodal input (o4 Mini accepts images and files; Grok 3 Mini is text-only per the payload); you need top-tier multilingual output; or you're tackling competition-level math tasks where o4 Mini's 97.8% MATH Level 5 score (Epoch AI) is relevant. Be aware that o4 Mini's minimum completion token requirement (1,000 tokens) and need for high max_completion_tokens can make it behave unexpectedly on short tasks.