// head_to_head
Gemini 4 Carbon vs Inkling
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Gemini 4 Carbon scores higher, Inkling costs less — it depends on your workload.
Gemini 4 Carbon is ahead by 39.2 points overall, and Inkling lists 2.3× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 39.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
Gemini 4 Carbon
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Nov 10, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.5
thinkingmachines
Inkling
- Blended / 1M
- $1.76
- Context
- 524K
- Released
- Jul 17, 2026
- Overall score
- 44.3
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 4 Carbon | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 83.5win | 44.3 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0202 | $0.0195 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.00 | $1.76win |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $1.00win |
| Output price / 1M | $10.00 | $4.05win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.100win | $0.170 |
| Context window | 1.0Mwin | 524K |
| Max output tokens | 944Kwin | 472K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 4 Carbon on top, Inkling below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Gemini 4 Carbon | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,143/mo | $504.24/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,440/mo | $711.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,336/mo | $659.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,655/mo | $1,262/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,050/mo | $2,490/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Gemini 4 Carbon
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 83.5.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Gemini 4 Carbon
Leads on long-horizon agentic — 72.7 against 9.8.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Gemini 4 Carbon
Wider context window — 1.0M against 524K.
You are cost-constrained
Inkling
Cheaper on blended list price at $1.76 per million tokens.
Gemini 4 Carbon vs Inkling FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 4 Carbon or Inkling?
Gemini 4 Carbon scores higher, Inkling costs less — it depends on your workload. Gemini 4 Carbon is ahead by 39.2 points overall, and Inkling lists 2.3× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 39.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
Is Gemini 4 Carbon cheaper than Inkling?
Inkling is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Gemini 4 Carbon lists at $4.00 per million tokens and Inkling at $1.76 — Inkling is 2.3× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Gemini 4 Carbon charges $2.00 in and $10.00 out, Inkling charges $1.00 and $4.05 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Gemini 4 Carbon vs Inkling: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Gemini 4 Carbon scores 83.5 and Inkling scores 44.3 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That is a 39.2-point lead for Gemini 4 Carbon. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Gemini 4 Carbon or Inkling?
They are close. Gemini 4 Carbon costs $0.0202 per point of overall capability and Inkling costs $0.0195, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.
Does Gemini 4 Carbon or Inkling have a bigger context window?
Gemini 4 Carbon has the larger context window: 1.0M for Gemini 4 Carbon against 524K for Inkling. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Gemini 4 Carbon and Inkling support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.100 per million for Gemini 4 Carbon and $0.170 for Inkling, against full input rates of $2.00 and $1.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-11-06, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.