Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Google's Gemini 3.8 Pro and xAI's Grok 4.6 Mini.
| Metric | Gemini 3.8 Pro | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | — | |
| Standard Input / 1M | $4.00 | $0.40 | Grok 4.6 Mini (90% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.40 | $0.10 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $18.00 | $1.60 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Context Window | 1.05M | 512k | Gemini 3.8 Pro (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 64k | 64k | Gemini 3.8 Pro |
| Tokenizer Family | Google Gemini SentencePiece (256k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (200k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Gemini 3.8 Pro when your engineering requirements prioritize Google's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Gemini Tokenizer (±4%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $4/M input rate.
Opt for Grok 4.6 Mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (512k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.