A practical comparison of MiniMax M3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro or Flash across native multimodality, text reasoning, hosted cost, long output, open weights and deployment licensing.
Quick answers
This page compares MiniMax M3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro / Flash as separate product choices. The table focuses on workflow fit rather than assuming one option is the universal baseline.
Choose MiniMax M3 when native image and video understanding must sit inside the same coding or agent workflow. Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash for the lowest published hosted text price in this comparison, or V4 Pro when you need the higher-capacity text model and up to 384K API output. Both publish weights, but MiniMax uses its Community License while DeepSeek V4 uses MIT.
Official MiniMax and DeepSeek product, pricing and weight pages were checked on August 26, 2026. The comparison prioritizes documented modalities, limits, licenses and published hosted pricing. Vendor benchmarks are not merged into one score because model variants and evaluation harnesses differ.
Whether the task requires native image or video input, text-only reasoning, coding agents or very long generated output.
Published token rates, cache behavior, peak windows and the cost of long reasoning traces.
Weight availability, model size, active parameters, license and infrastructure requirements.
Multimodal coding and computer-use agents
MiniMax M3Its official weights support text, image and video input in one model, while DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash are documented as text models.
Lowest published hosted text price
DeepSeek V4 FlashDeepSeek publishes Flash rates as low as $0.007 per million cache-hit input tokens, $0.22 cache-miss input and $0.66 output during off-peak periods.
Very long hosted text output
DeepSeek V4DeepSeek documents up to 384K output for V4 API models; a comparable public M3 output guarantee was not confirmed in the checked official pages.
Self-hosting
Depends on license and infrastructure
Both weights are live. DeepSeek's MIT license is simpler, while MiniMax M3 has fewer active parameters but uses the MiniMax Community License; full serving requirements still need a capacity test.
| Criterion | MiniMax M3 | DeepSeek V4 Pro / Flash | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model shape | 427B total parameters with about 23B active parameters. | V4 Pro: 1.6T total and 49B active; V4 Flash: 284B total and 13B active. | Serving memory, bandwidth, quantization and parallelism matter more than active-parameter count alone. |
| Input modalities | Native text, image and video input in the official model repository. | V4 Pro and Flash are text models. DeepSeek lists a separate experimental Flash Vision API model. | Do not assume capabilities from Flash Vision apply to the open V4 Pro or Flash text weights. |
| Context and output | Up to 1M context in MiniMax API and official weights; the API page guarantees at least 512K. Public output limits should be checked per endpoint. | 1M context and up to 384K output for the documented V4 API models. | Test effective recall and total latency at your actual prompt and output lengths. |
| Reasoning controls | Enabled, adaptive and disabled thinking modes in the official repository; hosted controls depend on the endpoint. | Non-thinking, high and max reasoning modes are documented for the V4 family. | Reasoning mode can change output length, latency and cost significantly. |
| Weights and license | Weights are live on Hugging Face under the MiniMax Community License. | V4 Pro and Flash weights are live under the MIT License. | Review the full license and infrastructure plan before commercial self-hosting. |
| Published hosted pricing | MiniMax product pages direct users to API and Token Plan access; current M3 rates and long-context tiers should be checked in the live account. | Off-peak per 1M tokens: Flash $0.007 cache hit, $0.22 cache miss, $0.66 output; Pro $0.022, $0.66 and $1.98. Peak rates are higher. | Compare a complete task at the same time window, context length and reasoning setting. |
| Benchmark interpretation | MiniMax reports SWE-Bench Pro, SWE-Bench Verified, BrowseComp and long-horizon agent demonstrations. | DeepSeek reports separate results for Pro and Flash across coding, reasoning and agent tasks. | Different variants, prompts, tools and harnesses prevent a responsible one-number ranking. |