GPT-5 vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (88 vs 35 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is 92% 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 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$1.25 | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2025-08 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 74.9% | - |
| AIME 2025 | 94.6% | - |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | 88.4% | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
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
Choose o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks