Home/Compare/OpenAI o4-mini vs Claude Opus 5
Updated 2026-09-11 20:18 UTC
Head-to-Head Specification Battle

OpenAI o4-mini vs Claude Opus 5

Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's OpenAI o4-mini and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.

Core Technical & Pricing Comparison
MetricOpenAI o4-miniClaude Opus 5Advantage
Provider OrganizationOpenAIAnthropic
Standard Input / 1M$1.10$15.00OpenAI o4-mini (93% lower)
Cached Input / 1M$0.55$0.50Claude Opus 5 lower
Output / 1M$4.40$75.00OpenAI o4-mini lower
Context Window128k200kClaude Opus 5 (200k)
Max Generation Tokens65.5k16.4kOpenAI o4-mini
Tokenizer FamilyOpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary)Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary)

Interactive Side-by-Side Cost Simulator

Live Delta
Input Tokens / Req2,500
Output Tokens / Req800
Daily Requests10,000
OpenAI o4-miniLOWER COST
$1,674.75 / month
$0.00558 / request
Claude Opus 5
$23,812.50 / month
$0.0794 / request
Selecting OpenAI o4-mini saves $22,137.75 / month (93.0% savings) over Claude Opus 5.

When to Choose OpenAI o4-mini

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.

When to Choose Claude Opus 5

Opt for Claude Opus 5 when looking for Anthropic's tooling integration, specific context window depth (200k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $75/M rate.