Step Audio 2vsLing 3.1 Flash
Step Audio 2 leads the overall Podium Score by 0.5 points (89.0 vs 88.5).Category wins: Step Audio 2 2 — 5 Ling 3.1 Flash.Step Audio 2 is the cheaper pick ($0.024/M vs $0.8/M per 1M output tokens). Ling 3.1 Flash is faster (175 t/s vs 150 t/s).
Step Audio 2Drag slider or hover to compareLing 3.1 Flash
Quick VerdictAggregated 2026 Benchmark Analysis
Step Audio 2 is rated higher overall with a Podium Score of 89.0 (vs 88.5 for Ling 3.1 Flash). In head-to-head domain evaluations, Ling 3.1 Flash outperforms in 5 of 7 benchmark categories.
Coding & Engineering
Ling 3.1 Flash (50.0)
Inference Speed
Ling 3.1 Flash (175 t/s)
Cost Efficiency
Step Audio 2 ($0.024/M)
API Price / 1M (in · out)
Step Audio 2 $0.012/M · $0.024/M — Ling 3.1 Flash $0.15/M · $0.8/M
Choose Step Audio 2 for vision and multimodal apps, and Ling 3.1 Flash for complex reasoning and analysis.
| Metric | Step Audio 2 | Ling 3.1 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Score | 89.0 ▲ | 88.5 |
| Arena Elo | 1422 ▲ | 1418 |
| Intelligence Index | 89.0 ▲ | 56.0 |
| Coding | 0.0 | 50.0 ▲ |
| Math | 0.0 | 78.0 ▲ |
| Reasoning | 32.0 | 85.0 ▲ |
| Agentic | 55.0 | 58.0 ▲ |
| Knowledge | 46.0 ▲ | 42.0 |
| Multimodal | 85.0 ▲ | 40.0 |
| Long-context | 45.0 | 68.0 ▲ |
| Output speed | 150 t/s | 175 t/s ▲ |
| Output price | $0.024/M ▲ | $0.8/M |
| Context window | 64K | 131K ▲ |
Scores aggregated from five independent leaderboards. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Step Audio 2 vs Claude Mythos · Step Audio 2 vs Claude 5.5 Sonnet · Step Audio 2 vs Kimi K3.1 Pro · Step Audio 2 vs Eleven Multilingual v3