Thinking Machines: Inkling vs MiniMax: MiniMax M3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | minimax |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 78.0 |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $4.05/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 471,859 | 512,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 73.3 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 58.3 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 96.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and Inkling costs $2.01, so MiniMax M3 is about 3.4 times cheaper for the same work.
MiniMax M3 reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling.
Only Inkling offers audio input; only MiniMax M3 offers structured output and video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, MiniMax M3 on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Inkling was released in July 2026 and MiniMax M3 in May 2026.
Pick Inkling if you need audio input; pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost, 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 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 167 |
| Code Review | 128 | 162 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 133 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 160 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 173 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 151 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 142 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 134 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 141 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 143 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 164 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 153 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 151 |
| JSON Extraction | 111 | 147 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 116 | 135 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 145 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 145 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 156 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 115 | 131 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 138 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →