Grok 3 Mini vs o3

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

o3 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 41 to 23. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

o3's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 82.9 against 21.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SimpleQA, 21.7% to 84%. Grok 3 Mini does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $10.00 input / $40.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.30 input / $0.50 output per 1M tokens for Grok 3 Mini. That is roughly 80.0x on output cost alone. o3 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Grok 3 Mini is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. o3 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Grok 3 Mini.

Quick Verdict

Pick o3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 3 Mini only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Agentic

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Coding

o3

Grok 3 Mini

41.5

o3

78

41.5%
LiveCodeBench
Coming soon
Coming soon
HumanEval
78%

Multimodal & Grounded

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Reasoning

o3

Grok 3 Mini

21.7

o3

82.9

21.7%
SimpleQA
84%
Coming soon
MuSR
82%

Knowledge

Grok 3 Mini

Grok 3 Mini

74.1

o3

57.2

66.2%
GPQA
83.3%
78.9%
MMLU-Pro
Coming soon
Coming soon
MMLU
93.4%
Coming soon
SuperGPQA
85%
Coming soon
OpenBookQA
83%
Coming soon
HLE
24.9%

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Multilingual

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Mathematics

o3

Grok 3 Mini

39.7

o3

87

39.7%
AIME 2024
95.2%
Coming soon
AIME 2023
88%
Coming soon
AIME 2025
98.4%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2023
84%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2024
86%
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2025
85%
Coming soon
BRUMO 2025
87%

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Grok 3 Mini or o3?

o3 is ahead overall, 41 to 23. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SimpleQA, where the scores are 21.7% and 84%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Grok 3 Mini or o3?

Grok 3 Mini has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 74.1 versus 57.2. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Grok 3 Mini or o3?

o3 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 78 versus 41.5. Grok 3 Mini stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Which is better for math, Grok 3 Mini or o3?

o3 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 39.7. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Grok 3 Mini or o3?

o3 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 21.7. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 17, 2026

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