GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, or Llama 3.1 — which is right for your business? Compare on cost, quality, speed, privacy, and language support. Here's the evaluation framework.
🎯 Find Out What AI Can Automate in Your Business
Get a free AI-powered analysis of your workflows. See which tasks to automate first, how much time you'll save, and get a personalized implementation plan.
Get Free Analysis → No signup required • Results in 30 secondsModel Comparison
| Model | Cost (in/out per 1M) | Context | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o | $2.50 / $10 | 128K | Best all-around, tool use, speed | Not cheapest, OpenAI dependency |
| GPT-4o mini | $0.15 / $0.60 | 128K | Best value, fast, 80% of tasks | Limited reasoning for complex tasks |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3 / $15 | 200K | Best writing, long context, analysis | More expensive, no image gen |
| Claude 3 Opus | $15 / $75 | 200K | Deepest reasoning | Expensive, slow |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.25 / $5 | 2M | Huge context, cheap, multimodal | Inconsistent quality |
| Llama 3.1 70B | ~$0.50 (self-host) | 128K | Open source, private, cheap at scale | Needs GPU hosting, setup complexity |
| Llama 3.1 405B | ~$2 (self-host) | 128K | Open source, near-GPT-4 quality | Expensive to host, slow |
Evaluation Criteria
- Cost: Price per 1M tokens — but also consider total tokens used (context size matters)
- Quality: Accuracy for your specific task — test with your actual data
- Speed: Response time — critical for real-time apps (voice, chat)
- Context window: How much text it can process at once — 128K vs 2M matters for documents
- Privacy: Does the provider train on your data? (OpenAI API: no. ChatGPT consumer: maybe.)
- Language support: Japanese, English, multilingual quality varies significantly
- Tool use: Can it call APIs, execute functions? GPT-4o and Claude are best here
- Multimodal: Does it handle images, audio, video? GPT-4o and Gemini do
- Reliability: Uptime, rate limits, consistency of output
Which Model for Which Task
| Use Case | Recommended Model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Customer support chat | GPT-4o mini | Cheap, fast, good enough quality |
| Voice agents | GPT-4o | Fast response, tool use, low latency |
| Content writing | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Best writing quality, nuance |
| Code generation | Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o | Both excellent, Claude slightly better |
| Document analysis (large) | Gemini 1.5 Pro | 2M context window, cheap |
| Data extraction | GPT-4o mini | Cheap, structured output, fast |
| Complex reasoning | Claude 3 Opus or GPT-4o | Deepest thinking |
| Japanese language | GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 | Best Japanese quality |
| Private/on-premise | Llama 3.1 70B | Open source, self-hosted |
How to Test
- Pick 50-100 real examples from your business (actual customer messages, documents, etc.)
- Run them through 2-3 models using their playgrounds or APIs
- Score each response on: accuracy, tone, completeness, speed
- Calculate cost per 1,000 interactions for each model
- Choose the cheapest model that meets your quality bar
- Re-test quarterly — models and prices change fast
7
Major models to compare
9
Evaluation criteria
50-100
Test examples needed
Find your best AI model
We'll test models against your actual business data and recommend the best fit. Free assessment.
Book Free Assessment →