Thinking Machines: Inkling vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | x-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 91.2 |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $4.05/M | $6.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 500,000 |
| Max Output | 471,859 | 450,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 88.8 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 75.4 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 100.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling costs $2.01 and Grok 4.5 costs $3.50, so Inkling is about 1.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 524,288 and 500,000 tokens, about 786 and 750 pages.
Only Inkling offers audio input; only Grok 4.5 offers structured output.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Grok 4.5 on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Inkling if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Grok 4.5 if you need structured output 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 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 171 |
| Code Review | 128 | 167 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 164 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 180 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 154 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 142 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 135 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 144 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 146 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 170 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 154 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 154 |
| JSON Extraction | 111 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 116 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 146 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 146 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 159 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 115 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 140 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →