MiniMax
Updated May 2026
MiniMax
China's text-plus-speech generalist
MiniMax, based in Shanghai, is one of the original Chinese 'AI tigers' alongside Zhipu and Moonshot. They ship text, speech, and music models with some of the most aggressive pricing in the industry — often 10x cheaper than US equivalents. Their text models hit 200K+ context and their TTS is strong enough that voice apps sometimes pick MiniMax over ElevenLabs for cost reasons.
Variants
5
Best at
extremely low API pricing
Max context
205K
tokens
Pricing
M2.7 API
$0.30 in / $1.20 out
per million tokens
Speech API
~$0.20
per hour of audio
Variants
Sort the table by context window or cost to find the right variant. Click any version below for a battle card with ranks, pricing notes, and official links.
| Modalities | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
MiniMax M2.7 minimax-m2-7 | 205K | varies / varies | 2026 | text |
MiniMax M2.5 minimax-m2-5 | 205K | varies / varies | 2026 | text |
Abab 6.5 abab-6-5 | 200K | varies / varies | 2024 | text |
MiniMax M2 minimax-m2 | 197K | varies / varies | 2025 | text |
MiniMax-Speech minimax-speech-01 | — | varies / varies | 2025 | audio |
Battle card
Context rank
#1
within MiniMax
Capability rank
#1
modalities + reasoning
Weights
Closed
API/app access
Best fights to pick
- cheap production chat
- classification at volume
- high-QPS API workloads
Rankings are Tendril directory ranks, computed from the model data shown here. Public benchmark leaderboards change often, so official docs and current benchmark pages should be checked before buying or deploying.
Learn
Lessons about this model
Structured lessons that cover MiniMax directly or put it in context alongside its rivals.
Check yourself
Quizzes
Short, mixed-difficulty quiz sets on MiniMax and its model family.
Other Players: MiniMax, Cohere, Amazon, 01.AI, and More
5 questions
The broader landscape of model providers.
Start quiz →Hands-on
Try these prompts
Ready-made prompts that show MiniMax at its best. Use them in your own AI workspace, then compare the output with what you learned in Tendril.
MiniMax long-form Chinese writing
BuildersMiniMax's abab series is tuned for Chinese content creation — test it on a local marketing task.
Write a 500-character Weibo post announcing the launch of a bilingual language-learning app aimed at Chinese high-schoolers studying for TOEFL. Tone: warm, aspirational, not corporate.
MiniMax voice generation
CreatorsMiniMax's voice models are competitive for Mandarin TTS — try a news-anchor clone.
Generate a 30-second news-anchor voiceover in Mandarin reading this headline and lede. Natural intonation, neutral tone. [Paste Mandarin text]
Compare MiniMax with Qwen
BuildersBoth are Chinese-leading labs — same prompt in both to see style differences.
Explain quantum entanglement to a curious Chinese middle-schooler using one everyday analogy and no math. Then do the same in English.
Print & keep
Printable reference
One-page summaries and flowcharts — great for desks, classrooms, or study sessions.
Go deeper
Official resources
Straight from the lab — docs, API references, and the chat surfaces you can try today.
Strengths
- extremely low API pricing
- strong TTS and voice cloning
- solid 200K+ context windows
Limits
- reasoning trails frontier US models
- PRC censorship and data-residency
- English quality trails native English models