Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-02.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | inclusionai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 40.6 | 30.4 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.02/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $0.06/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 32,768 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | - |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 42.3 | 33.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Ling 3.0 Flash costs $0.037 and Inkling Small costs $0.75, so Ling 3.0 Flash is about 20.4 times cheaper for the same work.
Inkling Small reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Ling 3.0 Flash.
Only Inkling Small offers image input and audio input; only Ling 3.0 Flash offers structured output.
On our blended benchmark score Inkling Small leads 40.6 to 30.4.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 13 (Code Review, Code Completion, Code Refactoring and others), Ling 3.0 Flash on 7 (SQL Generation, Unit Test Generation, CI/CD Pipelines and others).
Pick Inkling Small if you need long documents, image input, audio input or benchmark performance; pick Ling 3.0 Flash if you need lower cost or structured output.
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 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 135 |
| Code Review | 136 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 133 |
| Bug Fixing | 144 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 125 |
| Code Documentation | 135 | 129 |
| Regex Writing | 123 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 121 | 121 |
| Frontend Component Design | 123 | 96 |
| Data Analysis | 126 | 129 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 123 | 129 |
| ETL Scripting | 129 | 127 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 132 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 130 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 125 | 84 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 125 | 84 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 144 | 135 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 125 | 125 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 123 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →