ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo vs Thinking Machines: Inkling Small
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-12.
| ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | bytedance-seed | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 16.0 |
| Input Price | $0.50/M | $0.45/M |
| Output Price | $2.50/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 262,144 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 21.3 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Seed 2.1 Turbo costs $1.12, so Inkling Small is about 1.5 times cheaper for the same work.
Inkling Small reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Seed 2.1 Turbo.
Only Seed 2.1 Turbo offers structured output and video input; only Inkling Small offers audio input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Seed 2.1 Turbo scores higher on 9 (SQL Generation, Unit Test Generation, Frontend Component Design and others), Inkling Small on 11 (Code Review, Code Completion, Code Refactoring and others).
Seed 2.1 Turbo was released in August 2026 and Inkling Small in July 2026.
Pick Seed 2.1 Turbo if you need structured output or video input; pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost, 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 2.1 Turbo | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 128 |
| Code Review | 126 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 128 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 127 | 135 |
| Bug Fixing | 130 | 140 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 118 |
| Code Documentation | 125 | 133 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 121 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 117 | 118 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 120 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 123 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 122 |
| ETL Scripting | 122 | 127 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 119 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 124 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 124 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 129 | 141 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 118 | 124 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →