Claude Opus 4.5 vs GPT-5 mini

Claude Opus 4.5 vs GPT-5 mini: GPT-5 mini is cheaper by 95% on average. Claude Opus 4.5 from Azure AI Foundry (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls) vs. GPT-5 mini from OpenAI (272,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.

Side-by-side cost

Live workload comparison

Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.

3,000
0272,000
400
0128,000
5,000
01,000,000
Azure AI Foundry
$3,805/mo
Input $5.00/M · Output $25.00/M
GPT-5 miniCheaper
OpenAI
$236/mo
Input $0.250/M · Output $2.00/M
At this workload, GPT-5 mini is 94% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.5 — a savings of $3,569/month ($42,826/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
  model: gpt-5-mini
  provider: openai
fallback:
  model: claude-opus-4-5
  provider: azure-ai-foundry
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 }   # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live
Claude Opus 4.5 GPT-5 mini
Input price $5.00/M $0.250/M
Output price $25.00/M $2.00/M
Context window 200,000 272,000
Max output 64,000 128,000
Function calling
Vision
Audio input
Reasoning
Prompt caching
Structured output
Pricing verified May 12, 2026 May 12, 2026
Cheaper option
~95% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.5
Larger context
272,000 tokens
More capabilities
5 of 6 capability flags advertised

Benchmark comparison

Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.

Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
Claude Opus 4.5
1,472
GPT-5 mini
1,395
HumanEvalcode
Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5 mini
93.5%
AIME 2024math
Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5 mini
91.1%
MMLU-Proreasoning
Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5 mini
82.0%
GPQA Diamondreasoning
Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5 mini
78.4%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent
Claude Opus 4.5
GPT-5 mini
68.0%