Grok 4 vs o4 Mini

Across our 12-test suite (scores shown are from our testing): - Wins for o4 Mini: structured output 5 vs Grok 4's 4 — o4 Mini is tied for 1st on structured output among 54 models, so JSON/schema tasks will be more reliable. creative problem solving 4 vs 3 — o4 Mini ranks 9 of 54 vs Grok 4 at rank 30, so idea generation and non-obvious solutions favor o4 Mini. tool calling 5 vs 4 — o4 Mini ties for 1st with 16 others, showing better function selection and argument accuracy in our tool-calling tests. agentic planning 4 vs 3 — o4 Mini ranks 16 of 54 vs Grok 4 at 42, so multi-step goal decomposition and recovery are stronger on o4 Mini. - Wins for Grok 4: constrained rewriting 4 vs 3 — Grok 4 ranks 6 of 53 vs o4 Mini 31, meaning Grok 4 handles hard character-limit compression better in our tests. safety calibration 2 vs 1 — Grok 4 ranks 12 of 55 vs o4 Mini 32, so Grok 4 is more likely to refuse harmful prompts appropriately in our evaluations. - Ties (no clear winner in our suite): strategic analysis (5/5), faithfulness (5/5), classification (4/4), long context (5/5), persona consistency (5/5), multilingual (5/5). Notably both models tie for long context at 5/5 in our tests, but Grok 4 offers a larger raw context window (256k vs o4 Mini's 200k). - External benchmarks (Epoch AI): o4 Mini posts 97.8% on MATH Level 5 and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI), which supplements our internal scores on advanced math. In short: o4 Mini dominates structured outputs, tool calling, creative problem solving and agentic planning in our benchmarks; Grok 4 holds advantages in constrained rewriting and safety calibration and gives a larger context window at much higher cost.

Pricing per 1k tokens (input + output are charged separately in the payload): Grok 4 charges $3 input / $15 output per 1k; o4 Mini charges $1.1 input / $4.4 output per 1k. To illustrate (assuming a 50/50 split between input and output tokens): - 1M tokens/month: Grok 4 ≈ $9,000 (1,000 * $9 avg), o4 Mini ≈ $2,750 (1,000 * $2.75 avg). - 10M tokens/month: Grok 4 ≈ $90,000; o4 Mini ≈ $27,500. - 100M tokens/month: Grok 4 ≈ $900,000; o4 Mini ≈ $275,000. If your workload is output-heavy (e.g., 80% output tokens), the gap widens because Grok 4's $15/1k output dominates costs. Teams running millions to hundreds of millions of tokens per month should care deeply about the gap; smaller experimentation budgets may accept Grok 4 for its specialty strengths, but at scale o4 Mini is far more cost-efficient.

Choose Grok 4 if you need: - Better safety calibration in our tests (score 2 vs o4 Mini 1) and superior constrained rewriting (4 vs 3). - The longest raw context window (256k) for massive documents and you can absorb ~3.4× higher token costs. Choose o4 Mini if you need: - Cost-efficient production at scale (input $1.1/1k, output $4.4/1k) and top-ranked structured output, tool calling, creative problem solving, and agentic planning in our suite. - Strong external math performance (MATH Level 5 97.8% and AIME 2025 81.7% per Epoch AI) while keeping operational costs manageable.