| Best for |
Agent orchestration, tool calling, structured output |
Router, micro-task, high-volume triage |
Premium coding, deep reasoning, legal analysis, long-form writing |
Intermediate validation, budget GDPR-safe, semantic classification |
Native multimodality (audio, video, images), CAG with grounding |
Ultra-budget triage and classification |
Real-time data, social trends, live event analysis |
Huge context at minimal cost |
Ultra-high volume tasks at near-zero cost (V3.2), budget math reasoning (R1) |
Swarm orchestration, sub-task parallelization |
Enterprise multilingual, 92-language translation |
Ultra-budget tasks, classification, routing |
Italian/EU workflows, GDPR compliance, text tasks, tool calling, agent orchestration |
Long-chain agentic workflows with tool calling (text-only). Cheaper alternative to Sonnet for workflow coordination. Not GDPR-safe for EU personal data. |
| Max context |
1.05M |
1.05M |
1M |
200K |
1M |
1M |
2M |
2M |
128K |
256K |
1M |
1M |
128K (up to 1M with advanced versions) |
200K |
| Input: text |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Input: images |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No (but integrable with external tools) |
No |
| Input: audio |
Yes (Realtime API) |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (native, up to 9.5h) |
No |
Yes (Voice API) |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (Omni) |
No |
No (but integrable with external tools) |
No |
| Input: video |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (native) |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (Omni) |
No |
No (but integrable with external tools) |
No |
| Image generation |
Yes (gpt-image) |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (inline) |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No (but integrable with external tools) |
No |
| Tool calling |
Most mature and reliable (>95%) |
Yes, basic |
Yes (strict tool use) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes (V3.2), No (R1 reasoner) |
Yes (300 steps) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes, advanced and reliable |
Yes (agent-specialized) |
| Structured output JSON |
Strict mode, most robust |
Yes |
Yes (GA) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes, strict mode |
Yes |
| Coding |
Good (dedicated Codex for agentic) |
Basic |
SWE-bench leader (80.7%). The best |
Sufficient |
Good |
Basic |
Good |
Basic |
Competitive at 1/10 cost |
Good (visual coding) |
Good (dedicated Coder variant) |
Basic |
Excellent for Python/JS/SQL, clear explanations |
Excellent (SOTA on SWE-bench, refactoring/debugging) |
| Reasoning / Math |
Good (o4-mini: 99.5% AIME) |
Limited |
Excellent (adaptive thinking) |
Sufficient |
Excellent (Deep Think) |
Limited |
Good |
Basic |
Excellent (R1: visible CoT, debuggable) |
Good |
Good (dedicated Math variant) |
Limited |
Excellent for logical problems, visible CoT |
Good |
| Translation / Multilingual |
Good |
Basic |
Good |
Good |
Good (24+ audio languages) |
Basic |
Basic |
Basic |
Basic |
Good (CN/EN) |
The best (92 languages, dedicated MT) |
Good |
Excellent for European languages, natural tone |
Excellent (CN/EN, bilingual leader) |
| Long context / CAG |
Good (1M, penalty beyond 272K) |
Basic |
Excellent (1M, caching -90%) |
200K, sufficient |
Excellent (Google Search grounding) |
Basic |
Best context/price ratio (2M) |
Best context/price ratio (2M) |
128K, limited |
Good (256K, CAG-specialized) |
Good (1M) |
Basic |
Good for RAG, EU data, context up to 128K |
Good (200K) |
| Real-time / Web search |
Yes (web search tool) |
No |
Yes (beta) |
No |
Yes (Google Search grounding) |
No |
The best (X + native server-side web) |
Yes (X + web) |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No (but integrable with external APIs: Twitter, Google Search, etc.) |
No |
| Agentic orchestration |
Most complete (Agents SDK, MCP, computer use) |
Basic |
Excellent (14.5h autonomous METR) |
Basic |
Good |
Basic |
Good (server-side tools) |
Basic |
Basic |
Best for swarm (100+ parallel sub-agents) |
Good (adaptive tool use) |
Basic |
Yes, parallel task support via API, easy integration with EU stack |
Excellent (long-chain, persistent tool use) |
| Batch API (-50%) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Prompt caching |
Yes (auto, ~90% discount) |
Yes |
Yes (-90% on cache hit) |
Yes |
Yes (-90%) |
Yes |
Yes (auto, 75-97%) |
Yes |
Yes (auto, 90%) |
Yes (75%) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes (up to 90% discount on hit) |
Yes |
| Fine-tuning |
Yes (SFT, DPO) |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes (Flash) |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes (open-weight, Apache 2.0/MIT) |
Yes (open-weight ChatGLM variants) |
| Embeddings |
Yes (native) |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes (multimodal) |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes (multilingual, open-weight) |
Yes |
| Open-weight |
Yes (gpt-oss, Apache 2.0) |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes (Gemma 3, 1B-27B) |
Yes |
Grok-1 obsolete (Apache 2.0) |
Grok-1 obsolete |
Yes (MIT, 671B MoE) |
Yes (Modified MIT, 1T MoE) |
Yes (Apache 2.0, up to 397B) |
Yes (Apache 2.0) |
Yes (Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, Mistral Large 2, Apache 2.0) |
Yes (previous versions, open variants) |
| OpenAI SDK compatibility |
Native (the standard) |
Native |
Test layer, not production. Use Messages API |
Test layer |
Dedicated endpoint, nearly complete |
Dedicated endpoint |
Drop-in |
Drop-in |
Drop-in |
Drop-in |
Drop-in (DashScope) |
Drop-in |
Partial (compatible with many tools, but not native like OpenAI) |
Drop-in |
| Main limitations |
Aggressive deprecation. Lock-in. Penalty beyond 272K tokens |
Limited reasoning |
Most expensive. No audio/video/image gen. No open-weight |
200K context. Limited reasoning |
Excessive safety filtering. Price doubles beyond 200K |
Reduced capabilities |
Young provider. Uncertain sustainability. Political biases |
Not suitable for coding or legal |
Data in China. No vision/audio. Throttling. Political censorship |
No EU representative. Training on user data. Immature ecosystem |
Fragmented documentation. Chinese law |
Reduced capabilities |
No native audio/video/image support; lower context than top models (but rapidly evolving) |
Hosted in China, not GDPR-safe, no multimodal input |
| Cost |
+++ |
+ |
+++++ |
++ |
+++ |
+ |
+++ |
+ |
+ |
++ |
+++ |
+ |
++ |
++ |