Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Mini and OpenAI's OpenAI o5-mini.
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Mini | OpenAI o5-mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | OpenAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.30 | $0.80 | GPT-5.6 Mini (63% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.03 | $0.20 | GPT-5.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $3.20 | GPT-5.6 Mini lower |
| Context Window | 400k | 200k | GPT-5.6 Mini (400k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 100k | OpenAI o5-mini |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base (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 OpenAI o5-mini when looking for OpenAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (200k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $3.2/M rate.