Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 91.4 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $10.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 88.0 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 77.0 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 100.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Claude Sonnet 5 costs $4.50, so Inkling Small is about 6.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Claude Sonnet 5 reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Claude Sonnet 5 offers structured output.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization), Claude Sonnet 5 on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Inkling Small was released in July 2026 and Claude Sonnet 5 in June 2026.
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you need long documents, structured output 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?
| Task | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 171 |
| Code Review | 128 | 167 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 164 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 180 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 154 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 141 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 135 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 144 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 146 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 171 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 153 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 154 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 138 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 124 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 146 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 146 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 159 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 122 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 140 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →