Claude Opus 4.5 vs Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

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

Claude Opus 4.5 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 77 to 31. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude Opus 4.5's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 90.9 against 30.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HumanEval, 91 to 16.

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Opus 4.5 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 Opus 4.5 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning).

Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) only becomes the better choice if you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.

Agentic

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

70.5

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

34

71
Terminal-Bench 2.0
33
73
BrowseComp
37
68
OSWorld-Verified
33

Coding

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

60.4

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

7.2

91
HumanEval
16
68
SWE-bench Verified
9
57
LiveCodeBench
8
62
SWE-bench Pro
6

Multimodal & Grounded

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

90.9

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

30.4

94
MMMU-Pro
25
87
OfficeQA Pro
37

Reasoning

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

87.7

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

35.3

95
SimpleQA
26
93
MuSR
26
87
BBH
63
82
LongBench v2
37
81
MRCRv2
40

Knowledge

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

70.9

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

25.2

99
MMLU
25
97
GPQA
24
95
SuperGPQA
22
93
OpenBookQA
20
81
MMLU-Pro
49
20
HLE
1
84
FrontierScience
29

Instruction Following

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

90

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

68

90
IFEval
68

Multilingual

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

86.1

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

59.7

90
MGSM
61
84
MMLU-ProX
59

Mathematics

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

93.2

Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)

40.9

99
AIME 2023
27
99
AIME 2024
29
98
AIME 2025
28
95
HMMT Feb 2023
23
97
HMMT Feb 2024
25
96
HMMT Feb 2025
24
96
BRUMO 2025
26
89
MATH-500
59

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 is ahead overall, 77 to 31. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HumanEval, where the scores are 91 and 16.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.9 versus 25.2. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 60.4 versus 7.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 93.2 versus 40.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 87.7 versus 35.3. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.5 versus 34. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 90.9 versus 30.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 90 versus 68. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 86.1 versus 59.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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