// head_to_head

Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.4 Mini

Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.

OpenRouter + LiveBenchAll comparisonsFull leaderboard

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher, GPT-5.4 Mini costs less — it depends on your workload.

Claude Opus 4.6 is ahead by 8.1 points overall, and GPT-5.4 Mini lists 5.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 8.1 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.

anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6

Blended / 1M
$10.00
Context
1M
Released
Feb 4, 2026
Overall score
74.5
reasoningtool callingimage inputfile inputprompt caching

openai

GPT-5.4 Mini

Blended / 1M
$1.69
Context
400K
Released
Mar 17, 2026
Overall score
66.4
reasoningtool callingfile inputimage inputprompt caching

Specs and pricing

MetricClaude Opus 4.6GPT-5.4 Mini
LiveBench overall

Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better.

74.5win66.4
Cost per point

Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability.

$0.2101$0.1871
Blended price / 1M

3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic.

$10.00$1.69win
Input price / 1M$5.00$0.750win
Output price / 1M$25.00$4.50win
Cached input / 1M

Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one.

$0.500$0.075win
Context window1Mwin400K
Max output tokens128K128K

Benchmarks by category

An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 4.6 on top, GPT-5.4 Mini below, both out of 100.

Agentic coding
49.0
41.7
Coding
78.2
71.6
Reasoning
88.7
71.3
Mathematics
89.3
78.5
Data analysistoo close to call
69.9
70.8
Language
83.3
71.0
Instruction following
63.3
59.8

What each one costs to run

Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.

WorkloadClaude Opus 4.6GPT-5.4 Mini
Support chatbot

1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests

$2876.00/mo$491.40/mo
RAG assistant

8K in / 600 out × 100K requests

$3700.00/mo$600.00/mo
Coding agent

40K in / 4K out × 20K requests

$3480.00/mo$582.00/mo
Document extraction

20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests

$6650.00/mo$1053.75/mo
Bulk classification

500 in / 20 out × 5M requests

$12,750/mo$1987.50/mo
Run these two through the cost calculator

Which should you pick?

Quality matters more than the bill

Claude Opus 4.6

Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 74.5.

The workload is coding or agentic work

Claude Opus 4.6

Leads on agentic coding — 49.0 against 41.7.

You need to fit large documents in one call

Claude Opus 4.6

Wider context window — 1M against 400K.

You are cost-constrained

GPT-5.4 Mini

Cheaper on blended list price at $1.69 per million tokens.

Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.4 Mini FAQ

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 Mini?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher, GPT-5.4 Mini costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Opus 4.6 is ahead by 8.1 points overall, and GPT-5.4 Mini lists 5.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 8.1 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.

Is Claude Opus 4.6 cheaper than GPT-5.4 Mini?

GPT-5.4 Mini is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $10.00 per million tokens and GPT-5.4 Mini at $1.69 — GPT-5.4 Mini is 5.9× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 4.6 charges $5.00 in and $25.00 out, GPT-5.4 Mini charges $0.750 and $4.50 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.

Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.4 Mini: which scores higher on benchmarks?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores 74.5 and GPT-5.4 Mini scores 66.4 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 8.1-point lead for Claude Opus 4.6. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.

Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 Mini?

They are close. Claude Opus 4.6 costs $0.2101 per point of overall capability and GPT-5.4 Mini costs $0.1871, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.

Does Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 Mini have a bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 has the larger context window: 1M for Claude Opus 4.6 against 400K for GPT-5.4 Mini. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.

Do Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 Mini support prompt caching?

Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 4.6 and $0.075 for GPT-5.4 Mini, against full input rates of $5.00 and $0.750. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.

Related comparisons

How these numbers are produced

  • Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
  • ScoresLiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
  • Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
  • “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.

Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.