Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.75/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $3.75/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | ✓ |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Gemini 3.6 Flash costs $1.69, so Inkling Small is about 2.2 times cheaper for the same work.
Gemini 3.6 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Gemini 3.6 Flash offers structured output and video input.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 6 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Gemini 3.6 Flash on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost; pick Gemini 3.6 Flash if you need long documents, structured output, video input 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 | Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 133 |
| Code Review | 128 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 128 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 121 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →