MiniMax: MiniMax M3 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.20
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.20 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | minimax | x-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 78.0 | 56.5 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $1.25/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $2.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 2,000,000 |
| Max Output | 512,000 | 1,800,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 73.3 | 61.0 |
| ai_index_agentic | 58.3 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 96.6 | - |
| eqbench | - | 45.7 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and Grok 4.20 costs $1.88, so MiniMax M3 is about 3.1 times cheaper for the same work.
Grok 4.20 reads up to 2,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 3,000 pages of text, against about 1,573 pages for MiniMax M3.
Only MiniMax M3 offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score MiniMax M3 leads 78.0 to 56.5.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, MiniMax M3 scores higher on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
MiniMax M3 was released in May 2026 and Grok 4.20 in March 2026.
Pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost, video input, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Grok 4.20 if you need long documents.
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 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.20 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 167 | 144 |
| Code Review | 162 | 149 |
| Code Completion | 133 | 121 |
| Code Refactoring | 160 | 151 |
| Bug Fixing | 173 | 153 |
| Unit Test Generation | 151 | 134 |
| Code Documentation | 142 | 140 |
| Regex Writing | 134 | 127 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 141 | 130 |
| Frontend Component Design | 143 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 164 | 135 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 138 |
| ETL Scripting | 151 | 141 |
| JSON Extraction | 147 | 123 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 135 | 120 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 145 | 135 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 145 | 135 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 156 | 153 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 131 | 119 |
| Blog Post Writing | 138 | 132 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →