Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Mini and xAI's Grok 4.6 Mini.
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Mini | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.30 | $0.40 | GPT-5.6 Mini (25% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.03 | $0.10 | GPT-5.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $1.60 | GPT-5.6 Mini lower |
| Context Window | 400k | 512k | Grok 4.6 Mini (512k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 64k | Grok 4.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (200k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for GPT-5.6 Mini when your engineering requirements prioritize OpenAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Exact BPE (o200k_base)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.3/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.