Compare/Phi-4 Mini Instruct vs gpt-oss-20B (low)

Phi-4 Mini Instructvsgpt-oss-20B (low)

Side-by-side comparison of pricing, 12 benchmarks, and generation speed.

Microsoft

Phi-4 Mini Instruct

Input
$0/M
Output
$0/M
Speed
44 tok/s
TTFT
0.37s
OpenAI

gpt-oss-20B (low)

Input
$0.06/M
Output
$0.2/M
Speed
280 tok/s
TTFT
0.45s

Winner by Category

Cheaper
Phi-4 Mini Instruct
Faster (tok/s)
gpt-oss-20B (low)
Lower Latency
Phi-4 Mini Instruct
Benchmarks (1-11)
gpt-oss-20B (low)

Pricing Comparison

MetricPhi-4 Mini Instructgpt-oss-20B (low)
Input ($/M tokens)$0$0.06
Output ($/M tokens)$0$0.2
Cost for 1M input + 100K output tokens:
Phi-4 Mini Instruct$0.00
gpt-oss-20B (low)$0.08

Speed Comparison

Output Speed (tokens/s) — higher is better
Phi-4 Mini Instruct
44 tok/s
gpt-oss-20B (low)
280 tok/s
Time to First Token (seconds) — lower is better
Phi-4 Mini Instruct
0.37s
gpt-oss-20B (low)
0.45s

Benchmark Comparison

Data from Artificial Analysis API — 12 benchmarks

Intelligence Index
8.420.8
Coding Index
3.614.4
Math Index
6.762.3
GPQA Diamond
33.1%61.1%
MMLU-Pro
46.5%71.8%
LiveCodeBench
12.6%65.2%
AIME 2025
6.7%62.3%
MATH-500
69.6%
Humanity's Last Exam
4.2%5.1%
SciCode
10.8%34.0%
IFBench
21.1%57.8%
TerminalBench
0.0%4.5%
Phi-4 Mini Instruct1 wins
11 winsgpt-oss-20B (low)

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper, Phi-4 Mini Instruct or gpt-oss-20B (low)?

Phi-4 Mini Instruct is cheaper overall. Its blended price (3:1 input/output ratio) is $0.00/M tokens vs $0.10/M for gpt-oss-20B (low).

Which model performs better on benchmarks?

gpt-oss-20B (low) wins 11 out of 12 benchmarks compared to 1 for Phi-4 Mini Instruct. See the detailed benchmark chart above for per-category results.

Which is faster for real-time applications?

gpt-oss-20B (low) generates tokens faster at 280 tok/s vs 44 tok/s. Phi-4 Mini Instruct also has lower time-to-first-token (0.37s vs 0.45s).

When should I use Phi-4 Mini Instruct vs gpt-oss-20B (low)?

Choose based on your priorities: Phi-4 Mini Instruct for lower cost, gpt-oss-20B (low) for stronger benchmark performance, and gpt-oss-20B (low) for faster generation. For latency-sensitive apps, check the TTFT comparison above.