Gemini 3.5 Flash vs MiniMax M3

Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash 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.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 87 to 76. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Gemini 3.5 Flash's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 83.8 against 64.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 76.2% 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.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is also the more expensive model on tokens at $1.50 input / $9.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens for MiniMax M3. That is roughly 7.5x on output cost alone. Gemini 3.5 Flash 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.