Hi,
According to what says about MPEG-4 vs H264, the latter one is compressing 1,5-2 times better with at least same quality. Your problem might be that you leave to VP to decide about the quality - the default value is rather high. As borate already said, try lower settings. You can check bitrate of your MPEG-4 compressed video and put the same bitrate in Export - File format - Video Quality/Bitrate. If you choose H264 with same bitrate as MPEG-4, you should get same file size but better quality!