Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) vs MiniMax: MiniMax M3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | anthropic | minimax |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 91.4 | 78.0 |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $5.00/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 512,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 88.0 | 73.3 |
| ai_index_agentic | 77.0 | 58.3 |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | 96.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) costs $2.25, so MiniMax M3 is about 3.8 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,000,000 and 1,048,576 tokens, about 1,500 and 1,573 pages.
Only MiniMax M3 offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) leads 91.4 to 78.0.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), MiniMax M3 on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others).
Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) was released in June 2026 and MiniMax M3 in May 2026.
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) if you need benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost or video input.
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 | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 171 | 167 |
| Code Review | 167 | 162 |
| Code Completion | 120 | 133 |
| Code Refactoring | 164 | 160 |
| Bug Fixing | 180 | 173 |
| Unit Test Generation | 154 | 151 |
| Code Documentation | 143 | 142 |
| Regex Writing | 136 | 134 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 144 | 141 |
| Frontend Component Design | 146 | 143 |
| Data Analysis | 171 | 164 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 154 | 153 |
| ETL Scripting | 154 | 151 |
| JSON Extraction | 140 | 147 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 126 | 135 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 146 | 145 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 146 | 145 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 160 | 156 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 131 |
| Blog Post Writing | 140 | 138 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →