GPT-5 vs o1
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5 is 33% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •o1 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than GPT-5's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 128K | ✓200K |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$10.00 | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2025-06 | 2024-09 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | - | 78.3% |
| HumanEval | - | 92.4% |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 48.9% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
GPT-5
- ✓Strong general-purpose reasoning
- ✓Excellent multimodal understanding
- ✓Broad domain knowledge
- ✓Consistent instruction following
- ✓Widely supported by third-party tools
o1
- ✓Best-in-class math and physics
- ✓Strong competitive coding (Codeforces, HumanEval)
- ✓Scientific reasoning (GPQA top performer)
- ✓Multi-step logic and planning
- ✓200K context for long technical documents
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-5 if you need...
- →General-purpose API integrations
- →Multimodal applications
- →Complex reasoning tasks
- →Enterprise deployments
Choose o1 if you need...
- →Math and science problems
- →Competitive programming
- →Complex multi-step reasoning
- →Research assistance