The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
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
#28 of 61
67based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#70 of 316
88.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#269 of 340
$3.50
Blended per 1M tokens
In $2.00 · Out $8.00
Cache hit price
#175 of 206
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−75%)
Context
#203 of 345
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
OpenAI: o3 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#15 of 61
82based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#22 of 316
131.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#236 of 340
$1.93
Blended per 1M tokens
In $1.10 · Out $4.40
Cache hit price
#189 of 206
$0.55
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#205 of 345
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: o3 scores 67 and OpenAI: o3 Mini scores 82 — a 14-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 88 tokens per second for OpenAI: o3 and 132 for OpenAI: o3 Mini, with time to first token at 2.7s and 3.2s. 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 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 67 based on 4 of 6 evaluations 82 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $3.50 $1.93
Output tok/s 88 132
Context window 200k 200k
Providers 1 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
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 67 82
Mathematics Index 92 88
Science Index 84 78
Reasoning Index 62 85
Agentic Index 60 —
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
MATH / AIME84 / 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

Per token typeCache discount
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

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: o3OpenAI: o3 Mini
Output tokens/s 88 132
Time to first token 2.7s 3.2s
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 72 $1.93 127

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 →