Llama 4 Maverick vs GPT-5 Mini

Meta's Llama 4 Maverick against OpenAI's GPT-5 Mini — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.

Last updated March 2026 · Compare other models
Quick Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick and GPT-5 Mini are virtually tied on benchmark quality (Elo 1310 vs 1310), but Llama 4 Maverick is 50% cheaper on blended cost. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger context window (1M vs 400K).

Llama 4 Maverick
Meta
GPT-5 Mini
OpenAI
Input Price $0.27/1M $0.25/1M
Output Price $0.85/1M $2.00/1M
Blended Price $0.56/1M $1.12/1M
LMSYS Elo 1310 1310
Context Window 1,000,000 400,000
Provider Meta OpenAI

Pricing breakdown

When comparing LLM API pricing, GPT-5 Mini charges $0.25 per 1M input tokens compared to Llama 4 Maverick's $0.27 — a 7% difference. For output tokens, Llama 4 Maverick costs $0.85/1M versus $2.00/1M for GPT-5 Mini. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), Llama 4 Maverick comes in at $0.56/1M tokens versus $1.12/1M for GPT-5 Mini.

Quality & benchmarks

In terms of quality, Llama 4 Maverick (Elo 1310) and GPT-5 Mini (Elo 1310) are essentially neck-and-neck on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard. The 0-point gap is within the margin of uncertainty, meaning both models deliver comparable output quality for most use cases. Your choice between them should come down to pricing, ecosystem preferences, and specific feature needs rather than raw benchmark performance.

Context window comparison

Llama 4 Maverick provides a significantly larger context window at 1M tokens compared to GPT-5 Mini's 400K tokens — 2.5x more capacity for processing long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations. With 1M tokens, Llama 4 Maverick can handle entire books, repositories, or multi-document analysis in a single prompt.

Monthly cost estimate

Adjust the sliders to see how costs compare for your workload.

Llama 4 Maverick
per month
GPT-5 Mini
per month

Choose Llama 4 Maverick if you need...

Open-source with 1M context
Low cost via API providers
Flexible deployment options

Choose GPT-5 Mini if you need...

Extremely affordable
400K context at budget pricing
Good quality for the price tier

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