Best Multimodal LLM (Vision + Text)
Ranked on vision benchmark accuracy, context window, and combined per-query cost for image + text workloads.
Updated April 2026. Top 3 this month: Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B, OpenAI: GPT-4o (2024-11-20).
How we rank
Multimodal workloads — document parsing, screenshot understanding, chart reading — demand a model that can handle dense visual information without hallucinating fields that are not present. We weight MMMU for vision reasoning and DocVQA for document tasks, alongside price because vision tokens are priced differently per provider.
Pillars and weights: MMMU (40%) · DocVQA (30%) · price (30%). Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Top ranked models
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15 | Qwen | $0.26 | $1.56 | 1,000,000 |
| 2 | Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B | Qwen | $0.39 | $2.34 | 262,144 |
| 3 | OpenAI: GPT-4o (2024-11-20) | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128,000 |
| 4 | MiniMax: MiniMax-01 | MiniMax | $0.20 | $1.10 | 1,000,192 |
| 5 | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,000,000 |
| 6 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-122B-A10B | Qwen | $0.26 | $2.08 | 262,144 |
| 7 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B | Qwen | $0.20 | $1.56 | 262,144 |
| 8 | Meta: Llama 4 Maverick | Meta | $0.15 | $0.60 | 1,048,576 |
| 9 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.00 | $0.00 | 262,144 | |
| 10 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.13 | $0.38 | 262,144 |
Tips for best multimodal llm (vision + text)
- Verify the provider's image-size and token-per-image policy before committing — pricing varies dramatically.
- For structured extraction, combine vision with JSON mode.
- Chart/graph understanding is still fragile. Add a text-only sanity check if the downstream consequence is high.
Frequently asked questions
Which LLM is best for vision tasks?
As of April 2026, our weighted top 3 are Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B, OpenAI: GPT-4o (2024-11-20).
Are image tokens cheap?
Usually cheaper per-image than people assume, but high-res detail modes can 10x the cost. Benchmark on your actual images.
Does any LLM do video natively?
Gemini and a few research-tier OpenAI SKUs handle video. The ecosystem is still early — expect to preprocess to frames for most use cases.
Related tasks
Want to model your own workload? Use the volume and switch-cost calculators on the main tool page. Sign in with Google to unlock compare-my-prompt with real tokenizer counts.
Data refreshed daily via our snapshot cron. See our public JSON API for programmatic access.