$ diff claude-sonnet-5-5 minimax-m3
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs MiniMax M3
Values come from Claude Sonnet 5.5 and MiniMax M3, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5
- context
- 1M
- weights
- closed
- $/M in
- $2
- $/M out
- $10
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $0.3
- $/M out
- $1.2
What actually differs
- Context window
- Identical — both accept 1M tokens, so context length is not a reason to pick either.
- Input price
- MiniMax M3 at $0.3/M against $2/M — 6.7× cheaper to feed. Standard rates: one of these labs also quotes a lower cached-input tier, which applies only when a prefix is reused — see the full spec below.
- Output price
- MiniMax M3 at $1.2/M against $10/M — 8.3× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
- Weights
- MiniMax M3 publishes weights (Open-weight (HuggingFace)); Claude Sonnet 5.5 is API-only. That decides self-hosting, air-gapped deployment and fine-tuning before any capability question does.
- Recency
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 shipped 119 days after MiniMax M3 (2026-09-28 vs 2026-06-01).
Full spec
| Attribute | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | MiniMax |
| Released | 2026-09-28 | 2026-06-01 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1,000,000 tokens (1M); min. 512K guaranteed |
| Pricing | $2/M input · $10/M output · cache reads 10% of base input | $0.30/M input · $1.20/M output ($0.06/M cached input) — OpenRouter catalogue, read 2026-07-28 |
| License | proprietary (API-only; no weight release) | Open-weight (HuggingFace) |
| Availability | Claude apps, Claude API as `claude-sonnet-5-5`, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry, Claude Platform on AWS | API (global, including English) + open-weight on HuggingFace |