OpenAIGPT-5 miniVSOpenAIGPT-5.6 Terra

Analysis by:the whichllmmodel Editorial Team|Updated: June 2026

Our Take

This matchup represents a clear tradeoff between peak intelligence and budget efficiency. GPT-5.6 Terra is noticeably superior (holding a 14.5% average lead in benchmarks), but it carries a massive 8.2x price premium. Choose GPT-5.6 Terra if you need top-tier reasoning or code debugging, but for high-volume pipelines, GPT-5 mini is the smarter business decision.

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Model Specs

GPT-5 mini

Website

Benchmarks & Scores

Coding (swe-bench-pro)

45.7%

excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases

Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)

81.6%

graduate-level science QA

Cost & Context

Cost (per 1M tokens)8.2x cheaper

$0.69Input: $0.25 | Output: $2.00

Context Window

400k tokens

Model Specs

GPT-5.6 Terra

Website

Benchmarks & Scores

Coding (swe-bench-pro)Winner (+17.7%)

63.4%

excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases

Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)Winner (+11.3%)

92.9%

graduate-level science QA

Cost & Context

Cost (per 1M tokens)

$5.63Input: $2.50 | Output: $15.00

Context WindowLarger

1.05M tokens

Read our data collection methodology

Frequently Asked Questions about GPT-5 mini vs GPT-5.6 Terra

GPT-5 mini is cheaper than GPT-5.6 Terra. GPT-5 mini has a blended cost of $0.69/1M tokens, which is about 8.2x cheaper than GPT-5.6 Terra at $5.63/1M tokens.

GPT-5.6 Terra is better for coding tasks on this benchmark. It scores 63.4% on swe-bench-pro (excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases) compared to GPT-5 mini which scores 45.7%.

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