Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking vs Grok 3 Mini

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Grok 3 Mini is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 23 to 18. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Grok 3 Mini's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 74.1 against 36. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 37% to 66.2%. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking is the reasoning model in the pair, while Grok 3 Mini is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Grok 3 Mini.

Quick Verdict

Pick Grok 3 Mini if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority or you need the larger 200K context window.

Agentic

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Coding

Grok 3 Mini

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

30

Grok 3 Mini

41.5

30%
HumanEval
Coming soon
Coming soon
LiveCodeBench
41.5%

Multimodal & Grounded

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Reasoning

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

34.9

Grok 3 Mini

21.7

36%
SimpleQA
21.7%
34%
MuSR
Coming soon

Knowledge

Grok 3 Mini

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

36

Grok 3 Mini

74.1

38%
MMLU
Coming soon
37%
GPQA
66.2%
35%
SuperGPQA
Coming soon
33%
OpenBookQA
Coming soon
Coming soon
MMLU-Pro
78.9%

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Multilingual

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Mathematics

Grok 3 Mini

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

37

Grok 3 Mini

39.7

38%
AIME 2023
Coming soon
40%
AIME 2024
39.7%
39%
AIME 2025
Coming soon
34%
HMMT Feb 2023
Coming soon
36%
HMMT Feb 2024
Coming soon
35%
HMMT Feb 2025
Coming soon
37%
BRUMO 2025
Coming soon

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Grok 3 Mini?

Grok 3 Mini is ahead overall, 23 to 18. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 37% and 66.2%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Grok 3 Mini?

Grok 3 Mini has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 74.1 versus 36. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Grok 3 Mini?

Grok 3 Mini has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.5 versus 30. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Which is better for math, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Grok 3 Mini?

Grok 3 Mini has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 39.7 versus 37. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Grok 3 Mini?

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 34.9 versus 21.7. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 17, 2026

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