While these guns both have similar beginnings and they share a designer, they are about as different as they can get. These guns share a common lineage in that James Sullivan was also a designer on the Mini-14 under Bill Ruger. While the Ruger Mini-14 is a scaled-down version of the M-14, which gets its roots from the M1 Garand. The AR-15 is a scaled-down variant of the AR-10 designed by Eugene Stoner and James Sullivan. Both of these firearms are based on other larger platforms that originally started in.
Since their inception, many people have compared the Ruger Mini-14 vs AR-15 to determine the better gun for their needs.