OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra vs MiniMax: MiniMax M3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | openai | minimax |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 93.0 | 78.0 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $12.00/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 1,050,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 512,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 90.7 | 73.3 |
| ai_index_agentic | 78.2 | 58.3 |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | 96.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and GPT-5.6 Terra costs $5.00, so MiniMax M3 is about 8.3 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,050,000 and 1,048,576 tokens, about 1,575 and 1,573 pages.
Only MiniMax M3 offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra leads 93.0 to 78.0.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, GPT-5.6 Terra scores higher on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), MiniMax M3 on 5 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, JSON Extraction and others).
GPT-5.6 Terra was released in July 2026 and MiniMax M3 in May 2026.
Pick GPT-5.6 Terra if you need benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost or video input.
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 | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 171 | 167 |
| Code Review | 168 | 162 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 133 |
| Code Refactoring | 165 | 160 |
| Bug Fixing | 181 | 173 |
| Unit Test Generation | 155 | 151 |
| Code Documentation | 141 | 142 |
| Regex Writing | 135 | 134 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 145 | 141 |
| Frontend Component Design | 147 | 143 |
| Data Analysis | 171 | 164 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 153 |
| ETL Scripting | 155 | 151 |
| JSON Extraction | 138 | 147 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 135 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 147 | 145 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 147 | 145 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 159 | 156 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 122 | 131 |
| Blog Post Writing | 140 | 138 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →