MiniMax: MiniMax M3 vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | minimax | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 78.0 | 76.7 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $0.65/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $3.41/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 512,000 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 73.3 | 73.0 |
| ai_index_agentic | 58.3 | 49.9 |
| ai_index_coding | 96.6 | 100.0 |
| eqbench | - | 63.5 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and Kimi K2.6 costs $1.50, so MiniMax M3 is about 2.5 times cheaper for the same work.
MiniMax M3 reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Kimi K2.6.
Only MiniMax M3 offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score MiniMax M3 leads 78.0 to 76.7.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, MiniMax M3 scores higher on 9 (Code Completion, Code Refactoring, Code Documentation and others), Kimi K2.6 on 11 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Bug Fixing and others).
MiniMax M3 was released in May 2026 and Kimi K2.6 in April 2026.
Pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost, long documents, video input or 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 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 167 | 168 |
| Code Review | 162 | 164 |
| Code Completion | 133 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 160 | 160 |
| Bug Fixing | 173 | 174 |
| Unit Test Generation | 151 | 152 |
| Code Documentation | 142 | 140 |
| Regex Writing | 134 | 136 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 141 | 142 |
| Frontend Component Design | 143 | 145 |
| Data Analysis | 164 | 166 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 151 |
| ETL Scripting | 151 | 151 |
| JSON Extraction | 147 | 147 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 135 | 134 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 145 | 144 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 145 | 144 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 156 | 156 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 131 | 131 |
| Blog Post Writing | 138 | 139 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →