GPT-5.5 vs GPT-5.5 Instant
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5.5 is meaningfully stronger at coding (93 vs 78 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.5 Instant is meaningfully stronger at speed (92 vs 62).
- •GPT-5.5 Instant has a 1050000 context window vs 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5.5 | GPT-5.5 Instant | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) | ✓1050000 |
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | 5.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | 30.00 |
| Release date | 2026-04 | 2026-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5.5 | GPT-5.5 Instant |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 82.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 58.6% | - |
| AIME 2025 | - | 81.2 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | - | 82.7 |
| FrontierMath Tier 1–3 | - | 51.7 |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-5.5 if...
- →Complex professional coding, data analysis, and multi-tool agentic workflows
- →Long-document or large-codebase tasks needing a 1M+ context window
- →You want OpenAI's recommended default frontier model for new projects
Choose GPT-5.5 Instant if...
- →Interactive chat and everyday assistant tasks where responsiveness matters most
- →High-volume, latency-sensitive workloads that do not need deep reasoning
- →General questions, drafting, and summarization at speed