OpenAI GPT-4 vs Perplexity Sonar Pro
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Sonar Pro is 6.3× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Sonar Pro accepts longer prompts: 200K vs 8K tokens.
- Sonar Pro is the newer model (released 2025-03-07).
| GPT-4 | Sonar Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | OpenAI | Perplexity |
| Released | 2023-05-28 | 2025-03-07 |
| Input / 1M | $30.00 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M | $60.00 | $15.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $37.50 | $6.00 |
| Context | 8K | 200K |
| Max output | 4K | 8K |
| Accepts | text | text, image |
| Reasoning | No | No |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $60.00 | $15.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | Operational |
Cost calculator
GPT-4
$2,700 per month$90.00 per day
Sonar Pro
$405 per month$13.50 per day
Sonar Pro saves $2,295 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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