MiniMax-M3 vs Mistral Medium 3.5
Pricing & Specs

MiniMax vs Mistral, side by side from a live registry. Specs below, then benchmark both on your own task.

$1.2
MiniMax-M3 output / 1M
$7.5
Mistral Medium 3.5 output / 1M
1M / 128K
context windows

TL;DR: On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), MiniMax-M3 is about 5.8x cheaper than Mistral Medium 3.5. But per-token price is not cost per result: a cheaper model that needs more tokens, retries, or hand-holding can end up more expensive on your workload. The specs below are facts; which one is better at YOUR task is measurable, not guessable.

API Pricing: MiniMax-M3 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

TokensMiniMax-M3Mistral Medium 3.5
Input$0.3 / 1M$1.5 / 1M
Output$1.2 / 1M$7.5 / 1M
Cached input$0.06 / 1M- / 1M

What that means in practice (1K input + 500 output tokens)

1x One typical task: $0.0009 on MiniMax-M3 vs $0.0052 on Mistral Medium 3.5
1K 1,000 runs: $0.90 vs $5.25
💡 Real cost depends on how verbose each model is on YOUR prompts. Benchmark to measure actual tokens, not estimates.

Specs Compared

SpecMiniMax-M3Mistral Medium 3.5
Context window1M tokens128K tokens
Max output tokens128K tokens-
Input modalitiestexttext, image
Knowledge cutoff--
Latency (measured)-~171ms median response
Reasoning modelYesNo
Tool / function callingYesYes
JSON modeYesYes
Prompt cachingYesNo

When to Choose Which

High volume on a budget: start with MiniMax-M3; only pay for Mistral Medium 3.5 if the benchmark shows a quality gap that matters.
Long documents or big codebases: MiniMax-M3 has the larger context window (1M vs 128K tokens).
Multi-step reasoning tasks: MiniMax-M3 is a reasoning model; expect better step-by-step work at the cost of more output tokens.
Everything else: the honest answer is to benchmark both on your actual task. Quality differences are task-specific and shift with every release.

FAQ

Which is cheaper, MiniMax-M3 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

MiniMax-M3 costs $0.3/$1.2 per 1M input/output tokens; Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.5/$7.5. On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), MiniMax-M3 is about 5.8x cheaper than Mistral Medium 3.5.

Which has the bigger context window, MiniMax-M3 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

MiniMax-M3 has a 1M-token context window; Mistral Medium 3.5 has 128K tokens.

Is MiniMax-M3 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

It depends on the task. Generic leaderboards won't tell you which one wins on YOUR workload. OpenMark lets you benchmark MiniMax-M3 and Mistral Medium 3.5 head to head on your own task with real API calls, no API keys needed, free tier available.

MiniMax-M3 or Mistral Medium 3.5 for YOUR Task?

Spec tables can't answer that. Run both head to head on your actual workload:
real API calls, ranked results with accuracy, cost, and latency. Free tier available.

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