head-to-head

MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash vs DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-23.

MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Vendorminimaxdeepseek
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score71.375.9
Input Price$0.15/M$0.15/M
Output Price$0.60/M$0.60/M
Context Window1,048,5761,048,576
Max Output524,288393,216
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index70.574.4

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, both cost $0.30 at current list prices.

Both read up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text.

Only MiniMax M3.1 Flash offers video input.

On our blended benchmark score DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 leads 75.9 to 71.3.

Across the 17 tasks where they differ, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).

Pick MiniMax M3.1 Flash if you need video input; pick DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 if you need benchmark performance 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?

TaskMiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 FlashDeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
SQL Generation 142 142
Code Review 145 146
Code Refactoring 147 147
Bug Fixing 149 150
Unit Test Generation 132 132
Code Documentation 138 138
Regex Writing 126 127
CI/CD Pipelines 128 128
Frontend Component Design 130 130
Data Analysis 134 135
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 136 136
ETL Scripting 137 138
OCR / Document Parsing 134 134
Table Extraction from PDFs 134 134
Long-Document Summarization 149 149
Short-Form Summarization 127 127
Blog Post Writing 130 130

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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