The Known Good Updated 25 Oct 2026 Subscribe
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini vs OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b ·OpenAI vs OpenAI

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini vs OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini profile OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b profile All comparisons
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#36 of 65
66based on 6 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#85 of 345
103.7
Output tokens per second
Price
#233 of 526
$0.69
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.25 · Out $2.00
Cache hit price
#107 of 412
$0.025
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#257 of 575
400k
tokens (~600 pages)
OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — OpenAI
Quality
#44 of 65
61based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#24 of 345
190.1
Output tokens per second
Price
#132 of 526
$0.26
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.15 · Out $0.60
Cache hit price
#197 of 412
$0.075
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#462 of 575
131k
tokens (~200 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini scores 66 and OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b scores 61 — a 5-point lead for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ahead on 1 and OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $0.69 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini and $0.26 for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b — OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is about 2.6× cheaper.

Throughput is 104 tokens per second for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini and 190 for OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b, with time to first token at 3.7s and 0.6s. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini accepts 400k tokens of context against 131k.

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is proprietary; OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 24 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 25 Oct 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Known Good Index 66 based on 6 of 7 evaluations 61 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $0.69 $0.26
Output tok/s 104 190
Context window 400k 131k
Providers 2 22
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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: GPT-5 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Known Good Index 66 61
Coding Index 51 —
Mathematics Index 93 —
Reasoning Index 54 —
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 Mini · marker = OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond75 / 76
Mock AIME 2024–2587 / 89
Terminal-Bench35 / 19

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini / OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini leads on 1 of 3, OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b on 2.

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 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Text Arena 1,373 1,366
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,390 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 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Input $/1M $0.25 $0.15
Output $/1M $2.00 $0.60
Blended $/1M $0.69 $0.26
Cache read $/1M $0.025 $0.075
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 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Context window 400k 131k
Max output tokens 128k 66k
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 MiniOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b
Output tokens/s 104 190
Time to first token 3.7s 0.6s
The Known Good

Providers

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

24 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini blendedOpenAI: GPT-5 Mini tok/s OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b blendedOpenAI: gpt-oss-120b tok/s
Azure · first party $0.69 114 — —
OpenAI · first party $0.34 88 — —
Cerebras — — $0.45 928
SambaNova — — $0.34 509
Crusoe — — $0.10 373
Groq — — $0.26 352
Nebius — — $0.26 340
Amazon Bedrock · first party — — $0.26 247
Parasail — — $0.26 220
Novita — — $0.10 202
BaseTen — — $0.20 197
Phala — — $0.26 186
Mara — — $0.30 180
Together — — $0.26 157
CoreWeave — — $0.07 114
AkashML — — $0.07 97
Google · first party — — $0.16 84
SiliconFlow — — $0.26 81
DigitalOcean — — $0.15 70
Near AI — — $0.06 61
DeepInfra — — $0.07 59
Venice — — $0.06 43
Mancer 2 — — $0.10 41
DekaLLM — — $0.07 37

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 →