OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra vs OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Nano
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Nano | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | openai | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 93.0 | 68.1 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $0.20/M |
| Output Price | $12.00/M | $1.25/M |
| Context Window | 1,050,000 | 400,000 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 90.7 | 63.1 |
| ai_index_agentic | 78.2 | 45.4 |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | 92.5 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, GPT-5.4 Nano costs $0.51 and GPT-5.6 Terra costs $5.00, so GPT-5.4 Nano is about 9.8 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.6 Terra reads up to 1,050,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,575 pages of text, against about 600 pages for GPT-5.4 Nano.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra leads 93.0 to 68.1.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, GPT-5.6 Terra scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), GPT-5.4 Nano on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others).
GPT-5.6 Terra was released in July 2026 and GPT-5.4 Nano in March 2026.
Pick GPT-5.6 Terra if you need long documents, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick GPT-5.4 Nano if you need lower cost.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Nano |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 171 | 163 |
| Code Review | 168 | 158 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 133 |
| Code Refactoring | 165 | 157 |
| Bug Fixing | 181 | 168 |
| Unit Test Generation | 155 | 148 |
| Code Documentation | 141 | 140 |
| Regex Writing | 135 | 132 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 145 | 139 |
| Frontend Component Design | 147 | 141 |
| Data Analysis | 171 | 159 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 151 |
| ETL Scripting | 155 | 148 |
| JSON Extraction | 138 | 146 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 134 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 147 | 144 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 147 | 144 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 159 | 154 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 122 | 130 |
| Blog Post Writing | 140 | 135 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →