The closest alternative to Kimi K2.5 is Qwen3.5-27B — comparable intelligence (37.2 vs 37.3); for a cheaper option, MiniMax M3 runs $0.300/M vs $0.375/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Qwen3.5-27B is the closest alternative to Kimi K2.5, with an Intelligence Index of 37.2 (Kimi K2.5 scores 37.3) at $0.195 per million input tokens.
Yes — MiniMax M3 costs $0.300 per million input tokens versus $0.375 for Kimi K2.5, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Kimi K2.5 — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.