$ diff kimi-k3 longcat-2-0
Kimi K3 vs LongCat-2.0
Values come from Kimi K3 and LongCat-2.0, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.
Moonshot AIKimi K3
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $3
- $/M out
- $15
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $0.3
- $/M out
- $1.2
What actually differs
- Context window
- Identical — both accept 1M tokens, so context length is not a reason to pick either.
- Input price
- LongCat-2.0 at $0.3/M against $3/M — 10.0× cheaper to feed. Standard rates: one of these labs also quotes a lower cached-input tier, which applies only when a prefix is reused — see the full spec below.
- Output price
- LongCat-2.0 at $1.2/M against $15/M — 12.5× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
- Weights
- Both publish weights — Kimi K3 under Modified MIT (commercial use permitted; weights publicly downloadable), LongCat-2.0 under MIT (commercially permissive). Check the licences rather than assuming they permit the same commercial use.
- Recency
- Kimi K3 shipped 16 days after LongCat-2.0 (2026-07-16 vs 2026-06-30).
Full spec
| Attribute | Kimi K3 | LongCat-2.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Moonshot AI | Meituan |
| Released | 2026-07-16 | 2026-06-30 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1 million tokens (LongCat Sparse Attention / LSA) |
| Pricing | $0.30/M cache-hit input · $3.00/M cache-miss input · $15.00/M output | $0.30/M input · $1.20/M output ($0.006/M cached input) — OpenRouter catalogue, read 2026-07-28. Open weights, so this is hosted-inference pricing rather than a licence fee. |
| License | Modified MIT (commercial use permitted; weights publicly downloadable) | MIT (commercially permissive) |
| Availability | Kimi Code, Kimi app, Kimi API; weights on Hugging Face (`moonshot-ai/kimi-k3`, released 2026-07-27) | Open-sourced 2026-06-30; previously served on OpenRouter under the codename "Owl Alpha" |