Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite vs Thinking Machines: Inkling
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-21.
| Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | Thinking Machines: Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.8 | 37.2 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | $2.50/M | $4.05/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 471,859 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 36.6 | 41.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite costs $0.93 and Inkling costs $2.01, so Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite is about 2.2 times cheaper for the same work.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling.
Only Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite offers structured output and video input.
On our blended benchmark score Inkling leads 37.2 to 31.8.
Across the 18 tasks where they differ, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores higher on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others), Inkling on 3 (Bug Fixing, Long-Document Summarization, Blog Post Writing).
Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite if you need lower cost, long documents, structured output, video input or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Inkling if you need benchmark performance.
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 | Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | Thinking Machines: Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 138 | 130 |
| Code Review | 139 | 135 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 141 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 143 | 143 |
| Unit Test Generation | 128 | 120 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 124 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 126 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 129 | 126 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 135 | 123 |
| ETL Scripting | 133 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 111 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 132 | 125 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 132 | 125 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 143 | 144 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 125 | 117 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →