Model comparison
Nova 2 Lite vs o4-mini
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 39.7 on the Noometry Index. Nova 2 Lite costs 2.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 19 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 19 benchmarks with published results for both. Nova 2 Lite scores higher in 2 categories and o4-mini in 7 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in agentic & tool use, where o4-mini leads 32.6 to 24.1.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard: 27.1% for Nova 2 Lite and 53.2% for o4-mini.
- Nova 2 Lite is cheaper at $0.30 / $2.50 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o4-mini.
- Nova 2 Lite accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 200K.
Side by side
| Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Amazon | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 39.7 | 41.6 |
| Released | 2025-12-01 | 2025-04-16 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | 1M | 200K |
| Max output | 64K | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.30 | $1.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $2.50 | $4.40 |
| Results tracked | 19 | 60 |
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Category by category
Coding Too close to call
Nova 2 Lite: 40.7 (#134), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1385 | 1368 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.6% |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 826.17 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |
Agentic & Tool Use o4-mini leads
Nova 2 Lite: 24.1 (#121), o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 27.1% | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |
Reasoning Nova 2 Lite leads
Nova 2 Lite: 27.5 (#118), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1364 | 1351 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.1% |
| SimpleBench | — | 38.7% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 58.7% |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 26% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 77.6% |
| LMCA | — | 26.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 145.64 |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |
Math o4-mini leads
Nova 2 Lite: 37.5 (#156), o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1359 | 1389 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 4.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 81.7% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |
Knowledge Too close to call
Nova 2 Lite: 43.0 (#94), o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | 18.6% |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1343 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 79.6% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 19.6% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Nova 2 Lite: —, o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |
Multilingual Too close to call
Nova 2 Lite: 47.1 (#153), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1337 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1364 | 1354 |
| LMArena French | 1381 | 1364 |
| LMArena German | 1343 | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1271 | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | 1284 | 1312 |
| LMArena Russian | 1343 | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1373 | 1347 |
Instruction Following o4-mini leads
Nova 2 Lite: 70.5 (#161), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1335 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |
Long Context o4-mini leads
Nova 2 Lite: 40.6 (#150), o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1335 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |
Writing & Preference Too close to call
Nova 2 Lite: 53.9 (#154), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)
| Benchmark | Nova 2 Lite | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1362 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1291 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1338 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Nova 2 Lite better than o4-mini?
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 39.7 on the Noometry Index. Nova 2 Lite costs 2.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Nova 2 Lite or o4-mini?
Nova 2 Lite is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens; o4-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.
Is Nova 2 Lite or o4-mini better for coding?
They score almost the same on coding (40.7 vs 40.9); test both on your own repository before choosing.
Which has the bigger context window?
Nova 2 Lite does, with 1M tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Nova 2 Lite and o4-mini share?
19 benchmarks have published results for both models. Nova 2 Lite has 19 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.