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 51. 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 coding, where it averages 47.1 against 19. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 48 to 10. Claude 3 Opus 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 Opus.
Pick Step 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 3 Opus only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority.
Step 3.5 Flash
60.2
Claude 3 Opus
48.1
Step 3.5 Flash
47.1
Claude 3 Opus
19
Step 3.5 Flash
66.7
Claude 3 Opus
70.3
Step 3.5 Flash
78.3
Claude 3 Opus
61.6
Step 3.5 Flash
60.8
Claude 3 Opus
45
Step 3.5 Flash
87
Claude 3 Opus
77
Step 3.5 Flash
82.8
Claude 3 Opus
69.8
Step 3.5 Flash
84.5
Claude 3 Opus
65.9
Step 3.5 Flash is ahead overall, 66 to 51. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 48 and 10.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.8 versus 45. 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 19. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified 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 65.9. 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 61.6. 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 48.1. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 3 Opus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.3 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 77. 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 69.8. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.