Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's OpenAI o4-mini and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.
| Metric | OpenAI o4-mini | Claude Sonnet 5 | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | Anthropic | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $1.10 | $3.00 | OpenAI o4-mini (63% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.55 | $0.20 | Claude Sonnet 5 lower |
| Output / 1M | $4.40 | $15.00 | OpenAI o4-mini lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 200k | Claude Sonnet 5 (200k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 65.5k | 16.4k | OpenAI o4-mini |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for OpenAI o4-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 $1.1/M input rate.
Opt for Claude Sonnet 5 when looking for Anthropic's tooling integration, specific context window depth (200k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $15/M rate.