Model Comparison 2026

GPT-5.5 vs Grok 4.20

GPT-5.5
OpenAI · Frontier · Proprietary
$13/1M · 1.1M ctx
Grok 4.20
xAI · Frontier · Proprietary
$1.63/1M · 2M ctx

Community Vote

Pick a winner in each dimension — change your vote anytime.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for $
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results — fewer refusals, loops, and format breaks

Specs & Pricing, Side by Side

Spec
GPT-5.5
Grok 4.20
Maker
OpenAI
xAI
Blended price / 1M
$13
$1.63
Input / output
$5.00 in · $30 out / 1M tokens
$1.25 in · $2.50 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1.1M
2M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.6
8.6
Agentic Ability
9.5
8.0
Speed
7.0
7.6
Value for $
7.5
8.5
Reliability
9.0
8.5

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: GPT-5.5 or Grok 4.20?

Updated 2026-06-22

Choose GPT-5.5 if you want hard reasoning and coding for teams in the OpenAI ecosystem. Choose Grok 4.20 if you want agents that genuinely need 2M tokens of context.

In our editorial scoring, GPT-5.5 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Grok 4.20 leads in 2. On price, GPT-5.5 runs about $13 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Grok 4.20 is about $1.63 and proprietary.

Where GPT-5.5 falls short
  • Premium pricing
  • Slower than mini/flash tiers
Full GPT-5.5 breakdown →
Where Grok 4.20 falls short
  • Big context costs add up fast
  • Smaller ecosystem than GPT/Claude
Full Grok 4.20 breakdown →

The model is half the story — the agent is the other half

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