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Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o4-mini
A detailed comparison of Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and o4-mini (OpenAI) across pricing, performance, and features.
Pricing Comparison
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | o4-mini | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | $1.10 | -63% |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $4.40 | -71% |
| Context window | 200K | 200K | — |
| Max output | 16K | 100K | — |
Benchmark Comparison
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 86% | 85% |
| HumanEval | 94% | 93.5% |
| GPQA | 70% | 76% |
Capabilities
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| code | ✓ | ✓ |
| reasoning | ✓ | ✓ |
| text | ✓ | ✓ |
| tool-use | ✓ | ✓ |
| vision | ✓ | ✓ |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Strengths
- ✓Opus 4.5 quality at 1/5th the cost
- ✓Best value for production workloads
- ✓1M context in beta
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Weaknesses
- ✗Long context pricing doubles above 200K
- ✗Slightly below Opus 4.6 on hardest tasks
o4-mini Strengths
- ✓Affordable reasoning model
- ✓200K context window
- ✓Good for math and science
o4-mini Weaknesses
- ✗Slower than non-reasoning models
- ✗Reasoning tokens add to effective cost
Quick Verdict
Best value: o4-mini is the more affordable option at $1.1/$4.4 per 1M tokens.
Higher benchmarks: o4-mini scores higher on average across available benchmarks (84.8% avg).
Choose o4-mini if cost matters most. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need the best possible quality for complex tasks.