Inkling Small vs Nova Lite 1.0 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.
Nova Lite 1.0 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
| Spec | Inkling Small | Nova Lite 1.0 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Thinkingmachines | Amazon | – |
| Type | Open-weight | Proprietary | THInkling Small |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 300K tokens | THInkling Small |
| Input price | $0.45/M · free self-host | $0.06/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Output price | $1.2/M · free self-host | $0.24/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No (API only) | THInkling Small |
| License | Open weights | Proprietary | THInkling Small |
Nova Lite 1.0 is ~5.0× cheaper than Inkling Small on output tokens ($0.24 vs $1.2 per M tokens).
| Capability | Inkling Small | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✓ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✓ | ✗ |
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
| Criterion | Inkling Small | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 5.0 | 4.0 |
| Openness | 5.0 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 5.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 5.0 |
Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.
Inkling Small is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 12B active parameters out of 276B total. It is positioned as the smaller, more efficient member of...
Amazon Nova Lite 1.0 is a very low-cost multimodal model from Amazon that focused on fast processing of image, video, and text inputs to generate text output. Amazon Nova Lite...
These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.
Inkling Small is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Nova Lite 1.0 may still lead on the hardest reasoning and agentic work. The gap keeps narrowing — benchmark both on your actual use case before deciding.
Yes. Inkling Small has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Nova Lite 1.0 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.
Choose Inkling Small if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Nova Lite 1.0 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.
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