o3-mini vs Gemini 1.5 Pro: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between o3-mini (OpenAI) and
Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
o3-mini costs $1.10/M input vs
$1.25/M for Gemini 1.5 Pro;
context windows are 200K vs
2.0M tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | o3-mini | Gemini 1.5 Pro |
|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Google |
|---|
| Released | 2025-01-31 | 2024-02-15 |
|---|
| Input price |
$1.10/M |
$1.25/M |
| Output price |
$4.40/M |
$5.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.5500/M |
$0.3100/M |
| Context window |
200K |
2.0M |
| Max output |
100K |
8K |
| Modalities |
text |
text image audio video |
| Tokenizer |
o200k_base |
gemini |
Capability matrix
| Capability | o3-mini | Gemini 1.5 Pro |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| reasoning |
Yes |
No |
| vision |
No |
Yes |
| streaming |
No |
Yes |
| audio |
No |
Yes |
| video |
No |
Yes |
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | o3-mini | Gemini 1.5 Pro | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.003300 |
$0.003750 |
o3-mini by $0.000450 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.006600 |
$0.007500 |
o3-mini by $0.000900 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.026400 |
$0.030000 |
o3-mini by $0.003600 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.116600 |
$0.132500 |
o3-mini by $0.015900 |
When to choose o3-mini over Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Per-token input cost is 12% lower — meaningful for high-volume workloads.
- Supports reasoning — Gemini 1.5 Pro does not.
When to choose Gemini 1.5 Pro over o3-mini
- Larger context window (2.0M vs 200K).
- Supports vision — o3-mini does not.
- Supports streaming — o3-mini does not.
- Supports audio — o3-mini does not.
- Supports video — o3-mini does not.
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