ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code vs Thinking Machines: Inkling
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-27.
| ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code | Thinking Machines: Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | bytedance-seed | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 39.4 |
| Input Price | $0.50/M | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | $3.00/M | $4.05/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 471,859 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 41.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Seed-2.0-Code costs $1.25 and Inkling costs $2.01, so Seed-2.0-Code is about 1.6 times cheaper for the same work.
Inkling reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Seed-2.0-Code.
Only Seed-2.0-Code offers structured output and video input; only Inkling offers audio input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Seed-2.0-Code scores higher on 9 (SQL Generation, Code Completion, Unit Test Generation and others), Inkling on 11 (Code Review, Code Refactoring, Bug Fixing and others).
Seed-2.0-Code was released in August 2026 and Inkling in July 2026.
Pick Seed-2.0-Code if you need lower cost, structured output or video input; pick Inkling if you need long documents or audio 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 | ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Code | Thinking Machines: Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 130 |
| Code Review | 126 | 135 |
| Code Completion | 128 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 127 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 130 | 143 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 120 |
| Code Documentation | 125 | 134 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 117 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 126 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 123 |
| ETL Scripting | 122 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 111 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 128 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 125 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 125 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 129 | 144 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 117 |
| Blog Post Writing | 118 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →