# Amazon Nova Micro vs o3-mini

> o3-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.7 to 29.9 on the Noometry Index. Amazon Nova Micro costs 31× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/amazon-nova-micro-vs-o3-mini
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 24

## Summary

- They share 24 benchmarks with published results for both. Amazon Nova Micro scores higher in 2 categories and o3-mini in 7 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in instruction following, where o3-mini leads 75.3 to 56.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is LiveBench Reasoning: 25.1% for Amazon Nova Micro and 89.6% for o3-mini.
- Amazon Nova Micro is cheaper at $0.035 / $0.14 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o3-mini.
- o3-mini accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 128K.

## Snapshot

| | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Amazon | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 29.9 | 36.7 |
| Rank | 290 | 205 |
| Context | 128K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.035 | $1.10 |
| Output $/M | $0.14 | $4.40 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Amazon Nova Micro: 30.0 (#289)
- o3-mini: 41.4 (#116)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Coding | 20.2% | 82.7% |
| LMArena Coding | 1218 | 1378 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 60.4% |
| SciCode | — | 39.8% |
| GSO | — | 1.3% |
| WeirdML | — | 43.7% |
| CadEval | — | 54% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Amazon Nova Micro: 21.9 (#125)
- o3-mini: 29.3 (#79)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 22.3% | — |
| Cybench | — | 22.5% |

## Reasoning

- Amazon Nova Micro: 16.7 (#289)
- o3-mini: 16.3 (#295)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Reasoning | 25.1% | 89.6% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1191 | 1366 |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 34% | 70.6% |
| LiveBench | 29.6% | 75.9% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 3% |
| SimpleBench | — | 22.8% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 34.5% |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 17% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 7% |
| DTBench | — | 68.8% |
| LMCA | — | 19% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 140.35 |
| ForecastBench | — | 59.6 |

## Math

- Amazon Nova Micro: 24.9 (#252)
- o3-mini: 27.6 (#236)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Math | 34.5% | 77.3% |
| LMArena Math | 1206 | 1396 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 18.6% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 0% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 76.9% |
| Omni-MATH | 21.4% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 96.5% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 12.4% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 4.2% |

## Knowledge

- Amazon Nova Micro: 29.2 (#231)
- o3-mini: 38.3 (#135)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1184 | 1364 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 77% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 15.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | 51.1% | — |
| Confabulations | — | 17.9% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.5% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 38.3% | — |
| MMLU | 70.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- Amazon Nova Micro: 36.7 (#234)
- o3-mini: 45.9 (#159)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1186 | 1319 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1209 | 1379 |
| LMArena French | 1237 | 1333 |
| LMArena German | 1192 | 1303 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1154 | 1286 |
| LMArena Korean | 1150 | 1314 |
| LMArena Russian | 1185 | 1304 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1225 | 1321 |

## Instruction Following

- Amazon Nova Micro: 56.6 (#267)
- o3-mini: 75.3 (#67)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 48% | 84.4% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1174 | 1338 |
| IFEval | 76% | — |

## Long Context

- Amazon Nova Micro: 36.5 (#224)
- o3-mini: 33.8 (#251)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1206 | 1343 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 50% |

## Writing & Preference

- Amazon Nova Micro: 39.7 (#242)
- o3-mini: 50.4 (#177)

| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Micro | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1208 | 1337 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1172 | 1286 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1178 | 1320 |
| LiveBench Language | 15.8% | 50.7% |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 61.7% |
| WildBench | 74.3% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Amazon Nova Micro better than o3-mini?

o3-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.7 to 29.9 on the Noometry Index. Amazon Nova Micro costs 31× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Amazon Nova Micro or o3-mini?

Amazon Nova Micro is cheaper. It lists at $0.035 per million input tokens and $0.14 per million output tokens; o3-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.

### Is Amazon Nova Micro or o3-mini better for coding?

o3-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.4 versus 30.0 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

o3-mini does, with 200K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Amazon Nova Micro and o3-mini share?

24 benchmarks have published results for both models. Amazon Nova Micro has 32 scored results on Noometry and o3-mini has 51.