Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Step 3.5 Flash is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 66 to 60. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Step 3.5 Flash's sharpest advantage is in mathematics, where it averages 84.5 against 71.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 61. Claude 3.5 Sonnet does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Step 3.5 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Pick Step 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 3.5 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority.
Step 3.5 Flash
60.2
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
55
Step 3.5 Flash
47.1
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
37.8
Step 3.5 Flash
66.7
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
74.8
Step 3.5 Flash
78.3
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
67.7
Step 3.5 Flash
60.8
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
50.8
Step 3.5 Flash
87
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
83
Step 3.5 Flash
82.8
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
80.5
Step 3.5 Flash
84.5
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
71.2
Step 3.5 Flash is ahead overall, 66 to 60. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 61.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.8 versus 50.8. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 47.1 versus 37.8. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 84.5 versus 71.2. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 78.3 versus 67.7. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.2 versus 55. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 74.8 versus 66.7. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 82.8 versus 80.5. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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