Claude Sonnet 5 vs MiniMax M3

Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MiniMax M3 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Claude Sonnet 5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 94 to 78. 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 71.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 80.4% to 66%. MiniMax M3 does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

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 M3. That is roughly 12.5x on output cost alone. Claude Sonnet 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M3 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.