In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- MiniMax-M3 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $10 per million tokens, so Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs 8.3 times as much.
- MiniMax-M3 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Claude Sonnet 5.5 can't.
- No independent board we follow ranks both models yet.
Side by side
The specs.
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | MiniMax-M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Anthropic · US | MiniMax · China |
| Released | Sep 28, 2026 | Not stated |
| Price per 1M tokens | $2 in / $10 out | $0.30 in / $1.20 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text |
| Download and run it yourself | No | Yes (minimax-community (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) |
| Size | Not published | ~428B parameters, ~23B active |
| Maker says | “High-performance model for coding and agents” | “MiniMax-M3 is a native multimodal model with 1M context.” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
| Board | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | MiniMax-M3 |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities IndexEpoch AI, Oct 20, 2026 | #6164.45 | Not listed |
| LMArena WebDevLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #3 | Not listed |
| LMArena mathLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | #15 | Not listed |
| LMArena Agent ArenaLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #5 | Not listed |
| Humanity's Last ExamScale AI | #6 | Not listed |
| SWE-Bench ProScale AI, Sep 22, 2026 | #8 | Not listed |
| Vals IndexVals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #1 | Not listed |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0Vals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #2 | Not listed |
| Vibe Code BenchVals AI, Oct 18, 2026 | #1 | Not listed |
| ProofBenchVals AI, Oct 12, 2026 | #1 | Not listed |
| GPQA Diamond (run by Vals AI, archived)Vals AI, Sep 1, 2026 | Not listed | #15 |
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