GPT-4o vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-4o is meaningfully stronger at speed (85 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at math (92 vs 62).
- •GPT-5 is 50% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •GPT-5 has a 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-4o | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) | ✓400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.50 | ✓$1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2024-05 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-4o | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 88.7% | - |
| HumanEval | 90.2% | - |
| MATH | 76.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 74.9% |
| AIME 2025 | - | 94.6% |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | - | 88.4% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses
Choose GPT-5 if...
- →You want strong reasoning at the lowest frontier-model price
- →Existing GPT-5-based systems that are already tuned and validated
- →General coding, math, and reasoning workloads on a budget