# Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite vs o3-mini

> Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and o3-mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (37.0 vs 36.7), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gemini-2-5-flash-lite-vs-o3-mini
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 22

## Summary

- They share 22 benchmarks with published results for both. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite scores higher in 4 categories and o3-mini in 5 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite leads 38.0 to 28.1.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is WeirdML: 35.2% for Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and 43.7% for o3-mini.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.40 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o3-mini.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 200K.

## Snapshot

| | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 37.0 | 36.7 |
| Rank | 211 | 212 |
| Context | 1.05M | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.10 | $1.10 |
| Output $/M | $0.40 | $4.40 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 38.5 (#173)
- o3-mini: 40.8 (#132)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 35.2% | 43.7% |
| LMArena Coding | 1373 | 1378 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 60.4% |
| SciCode | — | 39.8% |
| GSO | — | 1.3% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 82.7% |
| CadEval | — | 54% |
| ALE-Bench | 325.9 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 28.0 (#96)
- o3-mini: 29.6 (#84)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 36.9% | — |
| Cybench | — | 22.5% |

## Reasoning

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 22.2 (#205)
- o3-mini: 16.3 (#305)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1377 | 1366 |
| DTBench | 62.8% | 68.8% |
| LMCA | 18.1% | 19% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 133.94 | 140.34 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 3% |
| SimpleBench | — | 22.8% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 40.5% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 34.5% |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 17% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 89.6% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 7% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 70.6% |
| ForecastBench | — | 59.6 |
| LiveBench | — | 75.9% |

## Math

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 38.0 (#144)
- o3-mini: 28.1 (#244)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1373 | 1396 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 18.6% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 0% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 76.9% |
| Omni-MATH | 48% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 77.3% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 96.5% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 12.4% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 4.2% |

## Knowledge

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 32.5 (#210)
- o3-mini: 38.3 (#146)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1373 | 1364 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 77% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 15.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | 53.7% | — |
| Confabulations | — | 17.9% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 3.3% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 30.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 29.1 (#114)
- o3-mini: —

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1198 | — |
| VPCT | 30% | — |

## Multilingual

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 49.3 (#134)
- o3-mini: 45.7 (#164)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1369 | 1319 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1404 | 1379 |
| LMArena French | 1388 | 1334 |
| LMArena German | 1389 | 1303 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1359 | 1286 |
| LMArena Korean | 1360 | 1314 |
| LMArena Russian | 1373 | 1304 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1396 | 1321 |

## Instruction Following

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 70.0 (#168)
- o3-mini: 75.1 (#72)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1367 | 1337 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 84.4% |
| IFEval | 81% | — |

## Long Context

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 33.3 (#262)
- o3-mini: 33.8 (#256)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 47.2% | 50% |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1373 | 1343 |

## Writing & Preference

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 56.8 (#135)
- o3-mini: 50.3 (#182)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | o3-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1379 | 1337 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1367 | 1286 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1366 | 1320 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 61.7% |
| WildBench | 81.8% | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 50.7% |

## FAQ

### Is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite better than o3-mini?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and o3-mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (37.0 vs 36.7), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite or o3-mini?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens; o3-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.

### Is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite or o3-mini better for coding?

o3-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.8 versus 38.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite does, with 1.05M tokens against 200K.

### How many benchmarks do Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and o3-mini share?

22 benchmarks have published results for both models. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has 33 scored results on Noometry and o3-mini has 51.
