# Inkling-Small vs Kimi K2.6

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for Inkling-Small and Kimi K2.6 across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/inkling-small-vs-kimi-2-6
- Last updated: September 10, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 19
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5

## Quick Verdict

Pick Kimi K2.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Inkling-Small only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- Kimi K2.6 leads overall 65.39 to 59.25.
- The clearest category separation is in multimodal & grounded, where the averages are 48.8 for Inkling-Small and 64 for Kimi K2.6.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is MCP Atlas in Agentic, with scores of 79.6% and 55.9%.
- Inkling-Small is the cheaper option on output tokens, which matters if you expect large responses or heavy interactive use.
- Inkling-Small also has the larger context window at 1M.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | Thinking Machines Lab | Moonshot AI |
| Type | Open Weight | Open Weight |
| Reasoning | Hybrid | Reasoning |
| Context | 1M | 256K |
| Overall Score | 59.25 | 65.39 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 25 | 37 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $0.58 / $1.44 | $0.95 / $4.00 |

## Category Breakdown

### Agentic

- Winner: Kimi K2.6
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 36.9 (Supported · #128/152)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: 46.7 (Supported · #74/152)

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 64.7% | 66.7% | Kimi K2.6 |
| BrowseComp | 77.4% | 83.2% | Kimi K2.6 |
| MCP Atlas | 79.6% | 55.9% | Inkling-Small |
| Toolathlon-Verified | 54.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 55.1% | 53.6% | Inkling-Small |
| OSWorld-Verified | Coming soon | 73.1% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon | Coming soon | 50% | Coming soon |
| Claw-Eval | Coming soon | 62.3% | Coming soon |
| DeepSearchQA | Coming soon | 92.5% | Coming soon |
| WideResearch | Coming soon | 80.8% | Coming soon |
| Gert Labs | Coming soon | 56.82% | Coming soon |
| ResearchClawBench | Coming soon | 18.0% | Coming soon |
| OSWorld 2.0 | Coming soon | 4.6% | Coming soon |

### Coding

- Winner: Kimi K2.6
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 43.8 (Supported · #97/151)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: 50.8 (Supported · #52/151)

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.2% | 80.2% | Tie |
| SWE-bench Pro | 55.9% | 58.6% | Kimi K2.6 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 64.7% | 66.7% | Kimi K2.6 |
| SciCode | 48.7% | 52.2% | Kimi K2.6 |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals) | 85.9% | 86.8% | Kimi K2.6 |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 82.2% | 76.2% | Inkling-Small |
| LiveCodeBench v6 | Coming soon | 89.6% | Coming soon |
| SWE Multilingual | Coming soon | 76.7% | Coming soon |
| Vibe Code Bench | Coming soon | 37.89% | Coming soon |
| cursorBench31 | Coming soon | 47.6% | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Kimi K2.6
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 48.8 (#39/48)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: 64 (#26/48)

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MMMU-Pro | 74% | 79.4% | Kimi K2.6 |
| CharXiv | 81.3% | 80.4% | Inkling-Small |
| CharXiv w/o tools | 77.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MMMU-Pro w/ Python | Coming soon | 80.1% | Coming soon |
| MathVision | Coming soon | 87.4% | Coming soon |
| V* | Coming soon | 96.9% | Coming soon |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Coming soon
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 42.7 (Unranked · 3 rankable rows)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 40.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CritPt | 8.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Knowledge

- Winner: Kimi K2.6
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 56.5 (Supported · #46/183)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: 61.5 (Supported · #32/183)

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| GPQA | 89.5% | 90.5% | Kimi K2.6 |
| GPQA-D | 89.5% | 90.5% | Kimi K2.6 |
| HLE | 47.8% | 34.7% | Inkling-Small |
| HLE w/o tools | 31.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 83.6% | 89.1% | Kimi K2.6 |
| MMLU-Pro (Vals) | 85.6% | 87.6% | Kimi K2.6 |

### Instruction Following

- Winner: Coming soon
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 89.6 (#25/123)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| IFBench | 82.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Mathematics

- Winner: Coming soon
- Inkling-Small public-lane score: 76.9 (Unranked · 2 rankable rows)
- Kimi K2.6 public-lane score: 71.3 (#1/7)

| Benchmark | Inkling-Small | Kimi K2.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| AIME26 | 95.5% | 96.4% | Kimi K2.6 |
| HMMT Feb 2026 | 90.2% | 92.7% | Kimi K2.6 |
| MMAnswerBench | Coming soon | 86.0% | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tiers 1-3) | Coming soon | 38.966% | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tier 4) | Coming soon | 14.580% | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, Inkling-Small or Kimi K2.6?

Kimi K2.6 is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between Inkling-Small and Kimi K2.6?

The widest category gap is in multimodal & grounded, where the averages are 48.8 for Inkling-Small and 64 for Kimi K2.6.

### How many benchmarks does Inkling-Small cover on BenchLM?

Inkling-Small currently has 25 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Kimi K2.6 cover on BenchLM?

Kimi K2.6 currently has 37 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [Inkling-Small vs Inkling](/compare/inkling-vs-inkling-small)
- [Kimi K2.6 vs Inkling](/compare/inkling-vs-kimi-2-6)
- [Inkling-Small vs Claude Fable 5.1](/compare/claude-fable-5-1-vs-inkling-small)
- [Kimi K2.6 vs Claude Fable 5.1](/compare/claude-fable-5-1-vs-kimi-2-6)

## Explore More

- [Inkling-Small profile](/models/inkling-small)
- [Kimi K2.6 profile](/models/kimi-2-6)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)