Claude Sonnet 5 vs MiniMax M2.7

Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MiniMax M2.7 only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Claude Sonnet 5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 94 to 52. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude Sonnet 5's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 81.8 against 57. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 80.4% to 57%.

Claude Sonnet 5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens for MiniMax M2.7. That is roughly 12.5x on output cost alone. Claude Sonnet 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M2.7 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude Sonnet 5 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for MiniMax M2.7.