o3-mini vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Both o3-mini and Claude Sonnet 4.6 sit at the mid-tier price point but solve different problems. o3-mini is OpenAI's reasoning specialist, optimized for math, science, and chain-of-thought workloads at a third the cost of GPT-5.5. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's balanced generalist, comparable on most general tasks at a similar price point but with stronger code generation and the same 200K context as Opus.
Head-to-Head Specs
| Spec | o3-mini | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Anthropic |
| Input Price | $1.10/1M | $3.00/1M |
| Output Price | $4.40/1M | $15.00/1M |
| Context Window | 200K | 200K |
| Released | 2025-01 | 2026-03 |
| Capabilities | text, reasoning, code | text, vision, tool-use, code |
Benchmark Scores
| Benchmark | o3-mini | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 86.3 | 88.7 | Claude |
| HumanEval | 89.7 | 92.0 | Claude |
| GPQA Diamond | 60.3 | 65.8 | Claude |
| MATH | 87.1 | 85.4 | o3-mini |
| SWE-bench | 49.3 | 55.7 | Claude |
See the full benchmark leaderboard for all models.
Category Breakdown
Sonnet 4.6 at 88.7 vs o3-mini at 86.3
Sonnet 4.6 at 92.0 vs o3-mini at 89.7
Sonnet 4.6 at 55.7 vs o3-mini at 49.3
o3-mini at 87.1 vs Sonnet 4.6 at 85.4. Reasoning specialist edges out.
Sonnet 4.6 at 65.8 vs o3-mini at 60.3
o3-mini at $1.10/$4.40 vs Sonnet 4.6 at $3/$15. ~3x cheaper.
Sonnet 4.6 has 200K vs o3-mini at 200K. Tie on size; Anthropic's long-context recall is generally stronger.
Choose o3-mini when:
- ▸Math and quantitative reasoning workloads
- ▸Cost-sensitive applications where mid-tier is the budget ceiling
- ▸OpenAI ecosystem and Assistants API integrations
- ▸Chain-of-thought reasoning patterns
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 when:
- ▸Code generation and software-engineering agents
- ▸Long-document analysis and research synthesis
- ▸Anthropic's tool-use semantics and MCP integration
- ▸Workloads that benefit from balanced generalist quality
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, o3-mini or Claude Sonnet 4.6?
It depends on your use case. o3-mini from OpenAI excels at math and quantitative reasoning workloads, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 from Anthropic is better for code generation and software-engineering agents. See the full comparison above for detailed benchmarks and pricing.
How much does o3-mini cost compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6?
o3-mini costs $1.10 input and $4.40 output per 1M tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 input and $15.00 output per 1M tokens.
What is the context window difference between o3-mini and Claude Sonnet 4.6?
o3-mini supports 200K tokens, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports 200K tokens.