The Known Good Updated 8 Oct 2026 Subscribe
OpenAI: o3 vs OpenAI: o3 Mini ·OpenAI vs OpenAI

OpenAI: o3 vs OpenAI: o3 Mini — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: o3 profile OpenAI: o3 Mini profile All comparisons
OpenAI: o3 — OpenAI
Quality
#26 of 65
72based on 5 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#201 of 356
58.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#395 of 504
$3.50
Blended per 1M tokens
In $2.00 · Out $8.00
Cache hit price
#356 of 384
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−75%)
Context
#387 of 550
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
OpenAI: o3 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#14 of 65
86based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#33 of 356
134.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#340 of 504
$1.93
Blended per 1M tokens
In $1.10 · Out $4.40
Cache hit price
#360 of 384
$0.55
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#394 of 550
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: o3 scores 72 and OpenAI: o3 Mini scores 86 — a 13-point lead for OpenAI: o3 Mini. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: o3 ahead on 3 and OpenAI: o3 Mini ahead on 0.

Blended pricing is $3.50 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: o3 and $1.93 for OpenAI: o3 Mini — OpenAI: o3 Mini is about 1.8× cheaper.

Throughput is 58 tokens per second for OpenAI: o3 and 134 for OpenAI: o3 Mini, with time to first token at 3.0s and 3.5s. OpenAI: o3 accepts 200k tokens of context against 200k.

OpenAI: o3 is proprietary; OpenAI: o3 Mini is proprietary. 1 tracked host serve one or both, and 1 serve both.

Generated from tracked data on 8 Oct 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 72 based on 5 of 7 evaluations 86 based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $3.50 $1.93
Output tok/s 58 134
Context window 200k 200k
Providers 1 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 72 86
Mathematics Index 92 88
Reasoning Index 59 85
Openness Index 5 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: o3 · marker = OpenAI: o3 Mini · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond82 / 77
Mock AIME 2024–2584 / 77
MATH Level 598 / 96

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: o3 / OpenAI: o3 Mini. OpenAI: o3 leads on 3 of 3, OpenAI: o3 Mini on 0.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Text Arena — 1,319
Text Arena (style controlled) — 1,348
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Input $/1M $2.00 $1.10
Output $/1M $8.00 $4.40
Blended $/1M $3.50 $1.93
Cache read $/1M $0.500 $0.550
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Context window 200k 200k
Max output tokens 100k 100k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Output tokens/s 58 134
Time to first token 3.0s 3.5s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

1 host · 1 serve both
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: o3 blendedOpenAI: o3 tok/s OpenAI: o3 Mini blendedOpenAI: o3 Mini tok/s
OpenAI · first party $3.50 44 $1.93 103

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →