OpenAI o4-mini

OpenAI·Apr 2025reasoningproprietary

81.0

modhub Index

o4-mini delivered most of o3's reasoning ability at roughly half the cost, with standout math results. It was the budget reasoning pick of mid-2025 before GPT-5 mini arrived with similar quality at a quarter of the price. Still available and still capable, it mostly matters today for teams pinned to the o-series API behavior.

Benchmark results

Where it shines

  • Outstanding math performance for its size
  • High throughput limits, good for parallel reasoning jobs
  • Vision-capable reasoning at mid-tier pricing

Alternatives to OpenAI o4-mini

Qwen3-Max

Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.

Gemini 3 Pro

Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.

DeepSeek V3.2

The sparse-attention release that halved DeepSeek's already-lowest-in-class prices while keeping GPT-class quality.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the OpenAI o4-mini API cost?
OpenAI o4-mini costs $1.1 per million input tokens and $4.4 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.28 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $17.60.
What is the context window of OpenAI o4-mini?
OpenAI o4-mini supports a context window of 200,000 tokens (200K), with up to 100K output tokens per response.
Is OpenAI o4-mini open source?
No — OpenAI o4-mini is a proprietary model available through OpenAI's API and partner platforms.
What are the best alternatives to OpenAI o4-mini?
The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.