o4-mini vs Gemini 3 Flash
OpenAI's o4-mini against Google's Gemini 3 Flash — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.
o4-mini leads on quality (Elo 1350 vs 1340), while Gemini 3 Flash compensates with 36% lower pricing. Gemini 3 Flash offers a larger context window (1M vs 200K).
| Input Price | $1.10/1M | $0.50/1M |
| Output Price | $4.40/1M | $3.00/1M |
| Blended Price | $2.75/1M | $1.75/1M |
| LMSYS Elo | 1350 | 1340 |
| Context Window | 200,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Provider | OpenAI |
Pricing breakdown
When comparing LLM API pricing, Gemini 3 Flash charges $0.50 per 1M input tokens compared to o4-mini's $1.10 — a 55% difference. For output tokens, Gemini 3 Flash costs $3.00/1M versus $4.40/1M for o4-mini. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), Gemini 3 Flash comes in at $1.75/1M tokens versus $2.75/1M for o4-mini.
Quality & benchmarks
On the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard — a crowd-sourced benchmark based on blind human preference voting — o4-mini scores 1350 Elo compared to Gemini 3 Flash's 1340, a 10-point advantage. While o4-mini has the edge, both models are competitive. o4-mini excels at cost-effective reasoning, coding assistance, and structured problem-solving, while Gemini 3 Flash is well-suited for high-throughput processing, real-time applications, and cost-sensitive pipelines.
Context window comparison
Gemini 3 Flash provides a significantly larger context window at 1M tokens compared to o4-mini's 200K tokens — 5.0x more capacity for processing long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations. With 1M tokens, Gemini 3 Flash 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.