Gemini 1.5 Pro vs o3-mini: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google) and o3-mini (OpenAI) comes down to three things: per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload. Gemini 1.5 Pro costs $1.25/M input vs $1.10/M for o3-mini; context windows are 2.0M vs 200K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.

Side-by-side specs

SpecGemini 1.5 Proo3-mini
ProviderGoogleOpenAI
Released2024-02-152025-01-31
Input price $1.25/M $1.10/M
Output price $5.00/M $4.40/M
Cached input $0.3100/M $0.5500/M
Context window 2.0M 200K
Max output 8K 100K
Modalities text image audio video text
Tokenizer gemini o200k_base

Capability matrix

CapabilityGemini 1.5 Proo3-mini
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
vision Yes No
streaming Yes No
audio Yes No
video Yes No
reasoning No Yes

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)Gemini 1.5 Proo3-miniCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.003750 $0.003300 o3-mini by $0.000450
RAG (4K / 500) $0.007500 $0.006600 o3-mini by $0.000900
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.030000 $0.026400 o3-mini by $0.003600
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.132500 $0.116600 o3-mini by $0.015900

When to choose Gemini 1.5 Pro over o3-mini

  • Larger context window (2.0M vs 200K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
  • Supports vision — o3-mini does not.
  • Supports streaming — o3-mini does not.
  • Supports audio — o3-mini does not.
  • Supports video — o3-mini does not.

When to choose o3-mini over Gemini 1.5 Pro

  • Per-token input cost is 12% lower than Gemini 1.5 Pro.
  • Supports reasoning — Gemini 1.5 Pro does not.

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