GPT-4.1 vs GPT-5: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between GPT-4.1 (OpenAI) and
GPT-5 (OpenAI) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
GPT-4.1 costs $2.00/M input vs
$1.25/M for GPT-5;
context windows are 1.0M vs
400K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | GPT-4.1 | GPT-5 |
|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
|---|
| Released | 2025-04-14 | 2025-08-07 |
|---|
| Input price |
$2.00/M |
$1.25/M |
| Output price |
$8.00/M |
$10.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.5000/M |
$0.1300/M |
| Context window |
1.0M |
400K |
| Max output |
33K |
128K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text image |
| Tokenizer |
o200k_base |
o200k_base |
Capability matrix
| Capability | GPT-4.1 | GPT-5 |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
Yes |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| reasoning |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | GPT-4.1 | GPT-5 | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.006000 |
$0.006250 |
GPT-4.1 by $0.000250 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.012000 |
$0.010000 |
GPT-5 by $0.002000 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.048000 |
$0.035000 |
GPT-5 by $0.013000 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.212000 |
$0.140000 |
GPT-5 by $0.072000 |
When to choose GPT-4.1 over GPT-5
- Larger context window (1.0M vs 400K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
When to choose GPT-5 over GPT-4.1
- Per-token input cost is 38% lower than GPT-4.1.
- Supports reasoning — GPT-4.1 does not.
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