Grok 3 vs o4 Mini

Across our 12-test suite Grok 3 and o4 Mini split direct wins (Grok 3 wins 2 tests, o4 Mini wins 2 tests) and tie on 8. Details from our testing:

• Grok 3 wins: safety calibration (Grok 3 = 2 vs o4 Mini = 1) and agentic planning (5 vs 4). Grok 3 ranks better on safety (rank 12 of 55, display: "rank 12 of 55 (20 models share this score)") and is tied for 1st on agentic planning (tied for 1st among 54 models). These translate to fewer risky approvals and stronger goal decomposition/failure recovery in task flows.
• o4 Mini wins: tool calling (5 vs 4) and creative problem solving (4 vs 3). Tool calling is a clear o4 Mini advantage: it is tied for 1st on tool calling (tied with 16 others, rank 1 of 54) while Grok 3 is rank 18 of 54 on the same test. That indicates o4 Mini is more reliable at function selection, argument accuracy, and sequencing when calling external tools.
• Ties (same score for both): structured output (5), strategic analysis (5), constrained rewriting (3), faithfulness (5), classification (4), long context (5), persona consistency (5), multilingual (5). For example, both models are tied for 1st on long context and structured output, so tasks needing schema compliance or retrieval across 30k+ tokens are equally well served in our benchmarks.
• Third-party math benchmarks (Epoch AI): o4 Mini posts 97.8% on MATH Level 5 and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (these external scores are reported by Epoch AI). Grok 3 has no external math scores in the payload. This makes o4 Mini the stronger choice where high-stakes math reasoning is needed. In short: o4 Mini is the better, cheaper tool-caller and idea generator in our tests; Grok 3 is stronger at planning and safety. Many core capabilities (classification, long context, structured outputs, faithfulness, multilingual, persona) are tied between them.

Prices in the payload are per mTok. Grok 3 charges $3 input / $15 output per mTok; o4 Mini charges $1.10 input / $4.40 output per mTok. Assuming 1 mTok = 1,000 tokens, costs scale as follows (all numbers rounded):

• 1M tokens (1,000 mTok): Grok 3 = $3,000 input or $15,000 output; o4 Mini = $1,100 input or $4,400 output. If traffic is 50/50 input/output: Grok 3 ≈ $9,000; o4 Mini ≈ $2,750.
• 10M tokens: Grok 3 ≈ $90,000 (50/50) vs o4 Mini ≈ $27,500.
• 100M tokens: Grok 3 ≈ $900,000 (50/50) vs o4 Mini ≈ $275,000. The payload gives a priceRatio of ~3.41: Grok 3 costs ~3.41× more per mTok overall. Teams with heavy usage (10M+ tokens/month), consumer apps, or cost-sensitive pipelines should prefer o4 Mini to lower infra spend. Teams prioritizing safety, agentic planning, or the description-backed enterprise strengths of Grok 3 should budget for the higher cost.

Choose Grok 3 if: you prioritize safer refusals and stronger agentic planning in production flows, need the enterprise-oriented capabilities described for coding, data extraction, and summarization, and can absorb higher infra costs (Grok 3 charges $3 input / $15 output per mTok). Choose o4 Mini if: you need a cost-efficient model with the best tool calling and stronger creative problem-solving in our tests, multimodal/file->text support, or top external math performance (MATH Level 5 97.8%, AIME 2025 81.7% per Epoch AI). o4 Mini costs $1.10 input / $4.40 output per mTok and is ~3.41× cheaper overall.