Best LLM for Reasoning
Ranked on MMLU-Pro, GPQA, and AIME. Price is a tiebreaker — reasoning quality dominates for reasoning-heavy work.
Updated April 2026. Top 3 this month: GPT-5, Gemini 2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7.
How we rank
Reasoning workloads — math, logic, science, multi-step planning — reward the top-tier frontier models disproportionately. The gap between the best and second-best can be a 20-point accuracy swing. We weight reasoning benchmarks heavily and use price only as a tiebreaker.
Pillars and weights: MMLU-Pro (35%) · GPQA (25%) · AIME (20%) · price (20%). Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Top ranked models
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GPT-5 | OpenAI | $1.25 | $10.00 | 200,000 |
| 2 | Gemini 2 Pro | $3.50 | $10.50 | 2,000,000 | |
| 3 | Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 200,000 |
| 4 | deepseek-r1-distill-llama-8b | DeepSeek | $0.40 | $0.40 | 33,000 |
| 5 | DeepSeek V3.2 | DeepSeek | $0.27 | $1.10 | 128,000 |
| 6 | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | $0.27 | $1.10 | 128,000 |
| 7 | o4-mini | OpenAI | $0.40 | $1.60 | 200,000 |
| 8 | Qwen 2.5 | Alibaba (Qwen) | $0.50 | $1.50 | 131,072 |
| 9 | GPT-5 mini | OpenAI | $0.25 | $2.00 | 400,000 |
| 10 | Mixtral 8x22B | Mistral | $1.20 | $1.20 | 65,536 |
Tips for reasoning
- Turn on native reasoning mode if the model offers it — the accuracy gains are real.
- Reasoning mode costs more tokens. Budget accordingly.
- Ensemble a cheap model + a reasoning model behind a router to control cost.
Frequently asked questions
Which LLM reasons best?
As of April 2026, our weighted top 3 for reasoning are GPT-5, Gemini 2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7.
Does reasoning mode cost more?
Yes — typically 2–5x in output tokens, occasionally more. Check your billing.
Do smaller models reason?
Not well on frontier benchmarks. For simple chains of thought they can be OK, but multi-step reasoning clearly separates the top tier.
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.