Head-to-head comparison
Nova 2 Lite (Amazon) and GPT-4o (2024-08-06) (OpenAI) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 9 September 2026
As of 9 September 2026, Nova 2 Lite holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#129 vs #132); Nova 2 Lite is 4× cheaper per output token ($2.50/1M vs $10.00/1M); and Nova 2 Lite offers the longer context window (1M vs 128K tokens).
Evidence: 2 public benchmark observations across 2 boards · 2 public benchmark observations across 2 boards. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
Want a different pairing? Open the interactive comparison tool to swap either model for any current ranked language model.
Nova 2 Lite ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 9 September 2026: #129 against #132. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it. Their published uncertainty intervals overlap, so the rank difference alone does not establish a reliable capability advantage for your workload.
Nova 2 Lite is cheaper on output tokens: $2.50/1M against $10.00/1M. Input tokens are $0.30/1M for Nova 2 Lite and $2.50/1M for GPT-4o (2024-08-06). Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens. For 1,000 requests with 2,000 input and 500 output tokens each (2M input + 0.5M output), the listed-rate estimate is $1.85 for Nova 2 Lite versus $10.00 for GPT-4o (2024-08-06). Nova 2 Lite costs 81.5% less in this scenario. This excludes caching, batch discounts, prompt-length tiers, tool charges and retries; verify the selected endpoint before budgeting.
Nova 2 Lite has the larger context window: 1M tokens against 128K.
Arena coding: Nova 2 Lite 1394, GPT-4o (2024-08-06) 1360 — Nova 2 Lite leads.
Nova 2 Lite: API only. GPT-4o (2024-08-06): API only. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 1 API provider for Nova 2 Lite and 2 for GPT-4o (2024-08-06), from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 9 September 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.