MiniMax M2.5 vs DeepSeek V4
Comprehensive comparison between MiniMax's MiniMax M2.5 and DeepSeek's DeepSeek V4. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.
MiniMax M2.5
MiniMaxMiniMax's flagship model with exceptional agentic capabilities at ultra-low cost. Demonstrates outstanding planning and stable execution of complex tool-calling tasks. One of the most capable AI agents available at a fraction of Claude/GPT pricing.
DeepSeek V4
DeepSeekDeepSeek V4 (released 2026-04-24) ships two MIT-licensed MoE variants: V4-Pro (1.6T/49B active) and V4-Flash (284B/13B active), both with 1M-token context and hybrid Compressed Sparse Attention + Heavily Compressed Attention. Three reasoning modes (Non-think / Think High / Think Max). V4-Pro uses only 27% of V3.2's FLOPs and 10% of its KV cache at 1M context. Priced well below GPT-5.5 / Opus 4.7 while matching them on most benchmarks.
Specs Comparison
| Specification | MiniMax M2.5 | DeepSeek V4 |
|---|---|---|
| Context Window | 197K | 1000K |
| Max Output | 32K | 66K |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.30 | $1.74 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $2.40 | $3.48 |
| Reasoning | ||
| Open Source |
Scenario Score Comparison
MiniMax M2.5
Pros
- + Extremely cheap ($0.20/1M input)
- + Strong tool calling & function calling
- + 197K context window
- + Excellent agentic performance
- + Supports Shell, Browser, Python, MCP
Cons
- − Less known in Western markets
- − Documentation mainly in Chinese
- − Smaller ecosystem than Claude/GPT
- − Rate limits on free tier
DeepSeek V4
Pros
- + 1M token context window with aggressive KV-cache compression
- + MIT license — fully open-source, self-hostable
- + V4-Pro $1.74/$3.48 per MTok — far cheaper than GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7
- + New SOTA for open models on SimpleQA-Verified (57.9)
- + OpenAI + Anthropic API-compatible endpoints
- + Three reasoning modes tunable per request
Cons
- − Still trails GPT-5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro by 3-6 months on frontier benchmarks
- − Servers in China (overseas latency, geopolitical concerns)
- − Text-only — V3's multimodal (image/video) capability not confirmed for V4
- − V4-Pro self-hosting needs substantial hardware (49B active × FP4/FP8)
Recommendation
Choose MiniMax M2.5 if you:
- • Need extremely cheap ($0.20/1m input)
- • Need strong tool calling & function calling
- • Need 197k context window
Choose DeepSeek V4 if you:
- • Need 1m token context window with aggressive kv-cache compression
- • Need mit license — fully open-source, self-hostable
- • Need v4-pro $1.74/$3.48 per mtok — far cheaper than gpt-5.5 and opus 4.7
Based on scores across 0 scenarios, both models perform equally well.
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