# OpenAI o4-mini vs OpenAI o3 (2026): Benchmarks, Price & Verdict | Alher Tech

> OpenAI o4-mini vs OpenAI o3: head-to-head 2026 comparison across Arena Elo, MMLU, GPQA, HumanEval, context window and pricing. Verdict + use cases.

- Canonical page: https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/o4-mini-vs-o3/
- Site: Alher Tech (custom software, AI agents and SEO engineering, https://alhertech.com/)
- Contact: https://alhertech.com/en/contact/

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|  | OpenAI o4-mini | OpenAI o3 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| arenaElo | 1362 | 1418 |
| humanEval | 88.6 | 92.4 |
| sweBench | 60 | 69.1 |
| mmlu | 85.4 | 90.2 |
| gpqa | 74.2 | 83.3 |
| aime | 92 | 91.6 |
| Price in/out ($/M) | $1.1 / $4.4 | $10 / $40 |

## Our verdict

o4-mini lands within 10 GPQA points of o3 at ~10% of the price. Unless you need the absolute top of the reasoning curve, o4-mini is the smarter default for reasoning workloads at scale.

[OpenAI o4-mini](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/o4-mini/) · [OpenAI o3](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/o3/) · [All AI model comparisons](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/)