Thinking Machines: Inkling vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-12.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 15.3 | - |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $0.19/M |
| Output Price | $4.05/M | $16.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 471,859 | 943,718 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 20.6 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling costs $2.01 and Kimi K3 costs $4.19, so Inkling is about 2.1 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.
Only Inkling offers audio input; only Kimi K3 offers structured output and video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling scores higher on 5 (Bug Fixing, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Kimi K3 on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Inkling if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Kimi K3 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 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 128 | 132 |
| Code Review | 131 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 128 |
| Code Refactoring | 135 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 139 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 118 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 132 | 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 | 126 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 111 | 128 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 116 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 124 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 124 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 140 | 136 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 116 | 120 |
| Blog Post Writing | 124 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →