Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's OpenAI o4-mini and xAI's Grok 4.6.
| Metric | OpenAI o4-mini | Grok 4.6 | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $1.10 | $2.00 | OpenAI o4-mini (45% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.275 | $0.50 | OpenAI o4-mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $4.40 | $6.00 | OpenAI o4-mini lower |
| Context Window | 200k | 500k | Grok 4.6 (500k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 64k | 128k | Grok 4.6 |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k 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 Grok 4.6 when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (500k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $6/M rate.