// head_to_head
Muse Spark Open vs MiniMax M3
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.
Muse Spark Open scores higher, MiniMax M3 costs less — it depends on your workload.
Muse Spark Open is ahead by 3.8 points overall, and MiniMax M3 lists 3.8× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 3.8 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
meta
Muse Spark Open
- Blended / 1M
- $2.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Oct 15, 2026
- Overall score
- 57.6
minimax
MiniMax M3
- Blended / 1M
- $0.525
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- May 31, 2026
- Overall score
- 53.7
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Muse Spark Open | MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 57.6win | 53.7 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | — | $1.33 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $2.00 | $0.525win |
| Input price / 1M | $1.25 | $0.300win |
| Output price / 1M | $4.25 | $1.20win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.150 | $0.060win |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 944Kwin | 512K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Muse Spark Open on top, MiniMax M3 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 | Muse Spark Open | MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $560.80/mo | $150.72/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $815.00/mo | $216.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $724.00/mo | $201.60/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $1,514/mo | $378.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $3,000/mo | $750.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Muse Spark Open
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 57.6.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Muse Spark Open
Leads on coding — 73.6 against 70.9.
You are cost-constrained
MiniMax M3
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.525 per million tokens.
Muse Spark Open vs MiniMax M3 FAQ
Which is better, Muse Spark Open or MiniMax M3?
Muse Spark Open scores higher, MiniMax M3 costs less — it depends on your workload. Muse Spark Open is ahead by 3.8 points overall, and MiniMax M3 lists 3.8× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 3.8 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
Is Muse Spark Open cheaper than MiniMax M3?
MiniMax M3 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Muse Spark Open lists at $2.00 per million tokens and MiniMax M3 at $0.525 — MiniMax M3 is 3.8× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Muse Spark Open charges $1.25 in and $4.25 out, MiniMax M3 charges $0.300 and $1.20 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Muse Spark Open vs MiniMax M3: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Muse Spark Open scores 57.6 and MiniMax M3 scores 53.7 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 3.8-point lead for Muse Spark Open. 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.
Does Muse Spark Open or MiniMax M3 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for Muse Spark Open and 1.0M for MiniMax M3.
Do Muse Spark Open and MiniMax M3 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.150 per million for Muse Spark Open and $0.060 for MiniMax M3, against full input rates of $1.25 and $0.300. 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 2026-09-02, 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.