// head_to_head
MiniMax M3 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3
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.
MiniMax M3 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
MiniMax M3 leads by 5.0 points overall while listing 3.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
minimax
MiniMax M3
- Blended / 1M
- $0.525
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- May 31, 2026
- Overall score
- 67.3
x-ai
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3
- Blended / 1M
- $1.56
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Apr 30, 2026
- Overall score
- 62.2
Specs and pricing
| Metric | MiniMax M3 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 67.3win | 62.2 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0339 | $0.0325 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $0.525win | $1.56 |
| Input price / 1M | $0.300win | $1.25 |
| Output price / 1M | $1.20win | $2.50 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.060win | $0.200 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1M |
| Max output tokens | 512K | 900Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — MiniMax M3 on top, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 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 | MiniMax M3 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $150.72/mo | $424.40/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $216.00/mo | $730.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $201.60/mo | $612.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $378.00/mo | $1,385/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $750.00/mo | $2,850/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
MiniMax M3
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 67.3.
The workload is coding or agentic work
MiniMax M3
Leads on agentic coding — 40.7 against 18.5.
MiniMax M3 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 FAQ
Which is better, MiniMax M3 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3?
MiniMax M3 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. MiniMax M3 leads by 5.0 points overall while listing 3.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
Is MiniMax M3 cheaper than SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3?
MiniMax M3 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, MiniMax M3 lists at $0.525 per million tokens and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 at $1.56 — MiniMax M3 is 3.0× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — MiniMax M3 charges $0.300 in and $1.20 out, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 charges $1.25 and $2.50 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
MiniMax M3 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3: which scores higher on benchmarks?
MiniMax M3 scores 67.3 and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 scores 62.2 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 5.0-point lead for MiniMax M3. 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, MiniMax M3 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3?
They are close. MiniMax M3 costs $0.0339 per point of overall capability and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 costs $0.0325, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.
Does MiniMax M3 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for MiniMax M3 and 1M for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3.
Do MiniMax M3 and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.060 per million for MiniMax M3 and $0.200 for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.3, against full input rates of $0.300 and $1.25. 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 2026-06-25, 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.