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o4-mini vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
A detailed comparison of o4-mini (OpenAI) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) across pricing, performance, and features.
Pricing Comparison
| Metric | o4-mini | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.10 | $3.00 | +173% |
| Output / 1M tokens | $4.40 | $15.00 | +241% |
| Context window | 200K | 200K | — |
| Max output | 100K | 16K | — |
Benchmark Comparison
| Benchmark | o4-mini | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 85% | 86% |
| HumanEval | 93.5% | 94% |
| GPQA | 76% | 70% |
Capabilities
| Capability | o4-mini | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| code | ✓ | ✓ |
| reasoning | ✓ | ✓ |
| text | ✓ | ✓ |
| tool-use | ✓ | ✓ |
| vision | ✓ | ✓ |
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
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
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.