MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) vs StepFun: Step 5 Preview
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-20.
| MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) | StepFun: Step 5 Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | minimax | stepfun |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 73.3 |
| Input Price | Free | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | Free | $2.70/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 524,288 | 64,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 72.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) costs $0 and Step 5 Preview costs $1.68, so MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) is free 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.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), Step 5 Preview on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) if you need lower cost; pick Step 5 Preview if you need 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 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) | StepFun: Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 134 | 142 |
| Code Review | 132 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 132 | 137 |
| Regex Writing | 120 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 134 | 136 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 132 | 123 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 130 | 120 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 138 | 149 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 124 | 118 |
| Blog Post Writing | 122 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →