MiniMax M2 / M2.5 vs Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
MiniMax M2 / M2.5
MiniMax's open-weights frontier -- first open model to match Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 10-20× lower cost
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Tencent's Hy3 Preview launched 2026-04-23 -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, open-sourced on HuggingFace under tencent/Hy3-preview. Cheapest frontier-class API at ~1.2 RMB per million input tokens. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ
| Category | MiniMax M2 / M2.5 | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 6.5 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 9.0 | 8.0 |
| Value | 9.5 | 9.5 |
| Features | 8.5 | 8.0 |
| Overall | 8.4 | 8.1 |
Personality & Tone
MiniMax M2 / M2.5: The Chinese multimodal generalist
Tone: Expressive and media-rich. MiniMax's chat models lean into long, formatted responses and handle voice and image prompts more naturally than most pure-text peers.
Quirks: Strong multimodal story; text-only quality is good but not class-leading versus DeepSeek or Qwen. Like other Chinese models, careful on domestic political topics.
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3): Tencent's first serious open-weights LLM
Tone: Direct and structured, similar to DeepSeek's chat tone -- compact answers in technical domains, reasonable Chinese-language polish, English noticeably less expressive than Claude or GPT.
Quirks: PRC content filters apply across the same set of regulated topics as DeepSeek and Qwen. Distribution via Yuanbao + WeChat + QQ means many Hy3 users in the wild are talking to it through chat-app surfaces rather than a developer console.
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | MiniMax M2 / M2.5 | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
MiniMax M2.5 (230B/10B active MoE) benchmarks — Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) has no published benchmarks
| Benchmark | Description | Score |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | Harder multi-subject reasoning | 82.1% |
| GPQA Diamond | Graduate-level science questions | 76.8% |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 80.2% | |
| HumanEval | Python code generation | 91% |
| AIME 2025 | 85.3% |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick MiniMax M2 / M2.5 if...
- ✓Higher output quality (9 vs 8)
Agentic coding and tool-use workflows on a budget. Best price-to-SWE-Bench ratio of any open-weights model in 2026.
Visit MiniMax M2 / M2.5Pick Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) if...
Chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong CN performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-DeepSeek pricing. Also anyone watching the open-weights field who wants Tencent's distribution-backed entry on the bench.
Visit Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)Our Verdict
MiniMax M2 / M2.5 edges out Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) with a 8.4 vs 8.1 overall score. Both are solid picks, but MiniMax M2 / M2.5 has the advantage in output quality.