ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-27.
| ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | bytedance-seed | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 73.9 |
| Input Price | $0.50/M | $3.00/M |
| Output Price | $3.00/M | $15.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 943,718 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 71.9 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Seed-2.0-Code costs $1.25 and Kimi K3 costs $6.75, so Seed-2.0-Code is about 5.4 times cheaper for the same work.
Kimi K3 reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Seed-2.0-Code.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Seed-2.0-Code scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), Kimi K3 on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Seed-2.0-Code was released in August 2026 and Kimi K3 in July 2026.
Pick Seed-2.0-Code if you need lower cost; pick Kimi K3 if you need long documents or the stronger all-round task scores.
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 | ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 140 |
| Code Review | 126 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 128 | 117 |
| Code Refactoring | 127 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 130 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 125 | 134 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 117 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 122 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 120 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 128 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 129 | 147 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 118 | 128 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →