Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 44 to 32. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 59.3 against 32.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMMU-Pro, 62 to 27. Ministral 3 8B does hit back in instruction following, 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 Ministral 3 8B 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 Ministral 3 8B.
Pick Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
46.7
Ministral 3 8B
28.9
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
21.8
Ministral 3 8B
14.2
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
59.3
Ministral 3 8B
32.4
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
49.4
Ministral 3 8B
36.1
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
34.3
Ministral 3 8B
28
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
66
Ministral 3 8B
69
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
58.7
Ministral 3 8B
61.7
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
48.3
Ministral 3 8B
43.3
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking is ahead overall, 44 to 32. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMMU-Pro, where the scores are 62 and 27.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 34.3 versus 28. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 21.8 versus 14.2. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 48.3 versus 43.3. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 49.4 versus 36.1. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 46.7 versus 28.9. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 59.3 versus 32.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 69 versus 66. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.7 versus 58.7. 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.