GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6.1 Terra
GPT-6.1 Terra and GPT-5.6 Terra score 85.8% vs 66.0% averaged across five Vision Evals tasks (#2 and #28 of 65 models), so GPT-6.1 Terra leads overall.
- GPT-6.1 Terra wins all 5 tasks, with its widest lead on OCR (81.9% vs 56.3%).
- GPT-6.1 Terra is about a third of the cost: $0.0033 vs $0.010 overall average cost per sample.
- GPT-5.6 Terra is faster: 9.5s vs 10.1s per sample.
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
Compare GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6.1 Terra live
Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.
These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.
GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6.1 Terra on Vision Evals
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6.1 Terra Comparison Table
Evals updated October 26, 2026Pricing updated October 27, 2026
| Property | GPT-5.6 Terra | GPT-6.1 Terra |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Category | closed | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Jul 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.1M | 1.1M |
| Parameters | Unknown | undisclosed |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Commercial use | commercial use per vendor terms | commercial use per vendor terms |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Output $/1M | $12.00 | $5.00 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | Supported |
| Classification | Demo | Supported |
| Object Detection | Demo | Supported |
| OCR | Demo | Supported |
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | Supported |
| Model Features | ||
Both support 3 more features | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 66.0% | 85.8% |
| Avg cost / sample | $0.010 | $0.0033 |
| Avg speed / sample | 9.52s | 10.05s |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 60.6% ±0.2, Mean of 3 runs, range 60.3 to 60.7 | 84.7% ±0.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.7 to 84.8 |
| Object Detection (high) | 61.3% ±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 60.8 to 61.6 | 84.7% ±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.2 to 84.9 |
| Counting (low) | 65.8% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 63.5 to 67.6 | 80.2% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4 |
| Counting (high) | 62.6% ±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 59.5 to 64.9 | 84.2% ±3.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 81.1 to 87.8 |
| Identification (low) | 86.5% ±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.4 to 87.5 | 96.9% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9 |
| Identification (high) | 86.5% ±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.4 to 90.6 | 96.9% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9 |
| OCR (low) | 56.3% | 81.9% |
| by category |
|
|
| OCR (high) | 56.9% | 84.4% |
| by category |
|
|
| Reasoning (low) | 60.9% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 59.6 to 63.6 | 85.4% ±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 83.4 to 86.8 |
| Reasoning (high) | 65.3% ±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 64.2 to 66.2 | 87.0% ±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 85.4 to 88.1 |
GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6.1 Terra: Overview
GPT-5.6 Terra is the mid-tier reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes the flagship Sol and the lightweight Luna. Introduced in a limited preview on June 26, 2026, and made broadly available on July 9, 2026, Terra accepts text and image input and produces text output, supporting vision, function calling, tool use, and agentic workflows. It is designed as a balanced option for everyday professional and production workloads — including coding assistance, document analysis, customer support, and multi-step agent tasks — where both output quality and cost efficiency matter. OpenAI positions Terra as delivering performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at approximately half the price, with a context window of around 1,050,000 tokens. Under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, Terra is rated High for cybersecurity and biological capabilities, meaning it demonstrates meaningful capability in those domains without reaching the Critical threshold.
GPT-5.6 introduces a new naming convention in which the generation number (5.6) is paired with a durable capability tier name (Sol, Terra, or Luna), allowing each tier to advance on its own schedule. Terra carries the API identifier gpt-5.6-terra and supports the same reasoning effort controls available across the family, including adjustable reasoning depth. The model includes prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life, with cache writes billed at 1.25x the uncached input rate and cache reads receiving a 90% discount. GPT-5.6 Terra is a proprietary, closed-weights model served through the OpenAI API, Codex, and ChatGPT.
GPT-6.1 Terra is an OpenAI model released on October 26, 2026 for visual reasoning, computer use and writing. It accepts text and image inputs and produces text, with a 1,050,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. OpenAI lists applications including matching product photographs to catalog entries, interpreting technical drawings and operating application screens.
The API exposes six reasoning effort settings: none, low, medium, high, xhigh and max. Medium is the default. The model supports structured outputs and tool calling through the Responses API. Vision Evals reports its Low and High results for text understanding, counting, identification, reasoning and object detection, using native OpenAI API inference. Terra is a proprietary model; its weights are not released.
Frequently Asked Questions
On Roboflow's Vision Evals, GPT-6.1 Terra performed better. It scores higher on all five vision tasks and averages 85.8% (#2 of 65) against 66.0% (#28 of 65) for GPT-5.6 Terra. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.
No. On the Vision Evals OCR benchmark at low effort, GPT-6.1 Terra leads with 81.9% against 56.3%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.
GPT-6.1 Terra is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0033 per sample against $0.010. GPT-5.6 Terra is priced at $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $12.00 per 1M output; GPT-6.1 Terra is priced at $1.00 per 1M input tokens and $5.00 per 1M output. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.
GPT-5.6 Terra is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 9.5s per inference against 10.1s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.