Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs MiniMax M3

Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$4.40/1M · 1M ctx
MiniMax M3
MiniMax · Balanced · Open weights
$0.57/1M · 1.0M ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Sonnet 5.5
MiniMax M3
Maker
Anthropic
MiniMax
Blended price / 1M
$4.40
$0.57
Input / output
$2.00 in · $10 out / 1M tokens
$0.30 in · $1.20 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
1.0M
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.8
8.4
Agentic Ability
9.8
8.7
Speed
8.4
7.8
Value for money
8.8
9.1
Reliability
9.4
8.6

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Sonnet 5.5 or MiniMax M3?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Sonnet 5.5 if you want the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 only for the hardest tasks. Choose MiniMax M3 if you want open-weight autonomous agents that lean on tool use.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed and reliability), while MiniMax M3 leads in 1. On price, Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs about $4.40 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; MiniMax M3 is about $0.57 and open-weight.

Where Sonnet 5.5 falls short
  • Artificial Analysis flags it as very verbose, which adds output tokens
  • Released September 2026, so its long-run track record is still short
Full Sonnet 5.5 breakdown →
Where MiniMax M3 falls short
  • Below frontier on raw quality
  • Newer, less battle-tested than V3.2/GLM
Full MiniMax M3 breakdown →

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