GPT-5 alternatives
9 models of comparable capability, ranked by blended token price. GPT-5 stays in the table, highlighted, as the baseline.
List prices checked
Ranked by blended token price
Cheapest first, at three input tokens per output token.
| # | Model | Provider | Input | Output | Blended | vs GPT-5 | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DeepSeek-V4-Pro | DeepSeek | $0.435 | $0.870 | $0.544 | 6.3× cheaper | 1M |
| 2 | Mistral Large | Mistral AI | $2.00 | $6.00 | $3.00 | 1.1× cheaper | 131K |
| 3 | GPT-5you are here | OpenAI | $1.25 | $10.00 | $3.44 | — | 400K |
| 4 | Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 | $10.00 | $3.44 | 1× dearer | 1M | |
| 5 | OpenAI o3 | OpenAI | $2.00 | $8.00 | $3.50 | 1× dearer | 200K |
| 6 | Cohere Command A | Cohere | $2.50 | $10.00 | $4.38 | 1.3× dearer | 256K |
| 7 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | $6.00 | 1.7× dearer | 200K |
| 8 | Grok 4 | xAI | $3.00 | $15.00 | $6.00 | 1.7× dearer | 256K |
| 9 | Claude Opus 5 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | $10.00 | 3.3× dearer | 200K |
| 10 | Claude Fable 5 | Anthropic | $10.00 | $50.00 | $20.00 | 5× dearer | 200K |
Source: OpenAI pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.
Questions
- What is the best alternative to GPT-5 in 2026?
- On blended token price, DeepSeek-V4-Pro is the cheapest comparable option — about 6.3× cheaper than GPT-5. Price is only half the decision: a model that costs 70% less but needs a second attempt on hard prompts is not a saving.
- Which alternative is cheapest for output-heavy work?
- Rank on the output column rather than the blended figure. Reasoning and agentic loops bill their thinking as output, so a model with cheap input and expensive output can end up the most costly option on the page despite looking competitive here.
- Do these alternatives have the same context window?
- No — the context column varies by more than 8× across this table. If you are feeding whole documents or codebases, filter on window size first and only then compare price, because a cheaper model that cannot hold your input is not an alternative at all.