The Known Good Updated 2 Sep 2026 Subscribe
OpenAI: GPT-5.5 vs OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b ·OpenAI vs OpenAI

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 vs OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 profile OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b profile All comparisons
OpenAI: GPT-5.5 — OpenAI
Quality
#5 of 65
93based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#65 of 339
85.0
Output tokens per second
Price
#412 of 439
$11.25
Blended per 1M tokens
In $5.00 · Out $30.00
Cache hit price
#295 of 322
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#30 of 473
1.05M
tokens (~1,600 pages)
OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — OpenAI
Quality
#44 of 65
62based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#10 of 339
167.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#19 of 439
$0.07
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.04 · Out $0.17
Cache hit price
unranked
per 1M tokens
Context
#360 of 473
131k
tokens (~200 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: GPT-5.5 scores 93 and OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b scores 62 — a 31-point lead for OpenAI: GPT-5.5. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: GPT-5.5 ahead on 2 and OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b ahead on 1.

Blended pricing is $11.25 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: GPT-5.5 and $0.07 for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is about 160.1× cheaper.

Throughput is 85 tokens per second for OpenAI: GPT-5.5 and 168 for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b, with time to first token at 4.9s and 0.7s. OpenAI: GPT-5.5 accepts 1.05M tokens of context against 131k.

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 is proprietary; OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 20 tracked hosts serve one or both, and 1 serve both.

Generated from tracked data on 3 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Known Good Index 93 based on 3 of 7 evaluations 62 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $11.25 $0.07
Output tok/s 85 168
Context window 1.05M 131k
Providers 3 18
Jump to section

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: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Known Good Index 93 62
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: GPT-5.5 · marker = OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond91 / 76
Mock AIME 2024–2584 / 89
Terminal-Bench85 / 19

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: GPT-5.5 / OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b. OpenAI: GPT-5.5 leads on 2 of 3, OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b on 1.

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: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Text Arena 1,467 1,366
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,477 1,352
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: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Input $/1M $5.00 $0.04
Output $/1M $30.00 $0.17
Blended $/1M $11.25 $0.07
Cache read $/1M $0.500
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: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Context window 1.05M 131k
Max output tokens 128k 118k
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: GPT-5.5OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Output tokens/s 85 168
Time to first token 4.9s 0.7s
The Known Good

Providers

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

20 hosts · 1 serve both
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: GPT-5.5 blendedOpenAI: GPT-5.5 tok/s OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b blendedOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b tok/s
Amazon Bedrock · first party $12.38 180 $0.26 314
OpenAI · first party $5.62 70
Azure · first party $11.25 54
Cerebras $0.45 418
Groq $0.26 320
Nebius $0.26 245
SambaNova $0.34 217
BaseTen $0.20 216
Google · first party $0.16 151
Parasail $0.26 132
CoreWeave $0.07 113
Novita $0.10 109
DeepInfra $0.07 106
Mancer 2 $0.17 101
Phala $0.26 87
AkashML $0.07 50
Mara $0.30 43
Together $0.26 33
DigitalOcean $0.14 31
SiliconFlow $0.15 30

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 →