Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between xAI's Grok 4.6 and OpenAI's OpenAI o5-mini.
| Metric | Grok 4.6 | OpenAI o5-mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | OpenAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.80 | OpenAI o5-mini (60% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.50 | $0.20 | OpenAI o5-mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $6.00 | $3.20 | OpenAI o5-mini lower |
| Context Window | 500k | 200k | Grok 4.6 (500k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 128k | 100k | Grok 4.6 |
| Tokenizer Family | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Grok 4.6 when your engineering requirements prioritize xAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated xAI Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $2/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.