Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-12.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 16.0 | - |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.19/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $16.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 943,718 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 21.3 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Kimi K3 costs $4.19, so Inkling Small is about 5.6 times cheaper for the same work.
Kimi K3 reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Kimi K3 offers structured output and video input.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 8 (Code Completion, Bug Fixing, Code Documentation and others), Kimi K3 on 11 (SQL Generation, Code Refactoring, Unit Test Generation and others).
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Kimi K3 if you need long documents, structured output 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 | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 128 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 128 |
| Code Refactoring | 135 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 140 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 118 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 133 | 128 |
| Regex Writing | 121 | 116 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 118 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 120 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 123 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 122 | 132 |
| ETL Scripting | 127 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 128 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 124 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 124 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 141 | 136 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 124 | 120 |
| Blog Post Writing | 124 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →