MoonshotAI Kimi K3 vs Perplexity Sonar Pro Search
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Kimi K3 is 2.1× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Kimi K3 accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 200K tokens.
- Kimi K3 is the newer model (released 2026-07-16).
| Kimi K3 | Sonar Pro Search | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | MoonshotAI | Perplexity |
| Released | 2026-07-16 | 2025-10-30 |
| Input / 1M | $0.239 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M | $10.80 | $15.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.21 | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $2.88 | $6.00 |
| Context | 1M | 200K |
| Max output | 944K | 8K |
| Accepts | text, image, video | text, image |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 30 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $8.25 | $15.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | Operational |
Cost calculator
Kimi K3
$176 per month$5.88 per day
Sonar Pro Search
$405 per month$13.50 per day
Kimi K3 saves $229 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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