# o4-mini vs Phi-4

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for o4-mini and Phi-4 across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/o4-mini-vs-phi-4
- Last updated: October 20, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 4
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5.8

## Quick Verdict

Pick o4-mini if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Phi-4 only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- o4-mini leads overall 64 to 24.97.
- The clearest category separation is in instruction following, where the averages are 83.9 for o4-mini and 28.8 for Phi-4.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is GPQA in Knowledge, with scores of 77.6% and 56.1%.
- Phi-4 is the cheaper option on output tokens, which matters if you expect large responses or heavy interactive use.
- o4-mini also has the larger context window at 200K.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | o4-mini | Phi-4 |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | OpenAI | Microsoft |
| Type | Proprietary | Open Weight |
| Reasoning | Reasoning | Non-Reasoning |
| Context | 200K | 16K |
| Overall Score | null | 24.97 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 7 | 5 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $1.10 / $4.40 | $0.00 / $0.00 |

## Category Breakdown

### Coding

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: Coming soon
- Phi-4 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | o4-mini | Phi-4 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| HumanEval | 97.3% | 82.6% | o4-mini |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: 66.9 (Unranked · 3 rankable rows)
- Phi-4 public-lane score: 25 (Unranked · 2 rankable rows)

| Benchmark | o4-mini | Phi-4 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| DROP | 77.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: 66.4 (Unranked · 1 rankable row)
- Phi-4 public-lane score: Coming soon

### Knowledge

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: Coming soon
- Phi-4 public-lane score: 23.2 (Supported · #180/187)

| Benchmark | o4-mini | Phi-4 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MMLU | 90% | 84.8% | o4-mini |
| GPQA | 77.6% | 56.1% | o4-mini |
| SimpleQA | 20.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Multilingual

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: Coming soon
- Phi-4 public-lane score: 1 (#17/17)

| Benchmark | o4-mini | Phi-4 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MGSM | 93.7% | 80.6% | o4-mini |
| MMLU-ProX | Coming soon | 49.9% | Coming soon |

### Instruction Following

- Winner: Directional only
- o4-mini public-lane score: 83.9 (#55/152)
- Phi-4 public-lane score: 28.8 (#137/152)

### Mathematics

- Winner: Not comparable
- o4-mini public-lane score: Coming soon
- Phi-4 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | o4-mini | Phi-4 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MATH-500 | 97.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, o4-mini or Phi-4?

o4-mini is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between o4-mini and Phi-4?

The widest category gap is in instruction following, where the averages are 83.9 for o4-mini and 28.8 for Phi-4.

### How many benchmarks does o4-mini cover on BenchLM?

o4-mini currently has 7 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Phi-4 cover on BenchLM?

Phi-4 currently has 5 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [o4-mini vs o4-mini (high)](/compare/o4-mini-vs-o4-mini-high)
- [Phi-4 vs o4-mini (high)](/compare/o4-mini-high-vs-phi-4)
- [o4-mini vs Claude Opus 5.5](/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-o4-mini)
- [Phi-4 vs Claude Opus 5.5](/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-phi-4)

## Explore More

- [o4-mini profile](/models/o4-mini)
- [Phi-4 profile](/models/phi-4)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)