Claude Opus 4.5 vs Ministral 3 8B (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 36. 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 33.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 99 to 30.

Ministral 3 8B (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 8B (Reasoning).

Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B (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 8B (Reasoning)

38.5

71
Terminal-Bench 2.0
39
73
BrowseComp
41
68
OSWorld-Verified
36

Coding

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

60.4

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

15.2

91
HumanEval
24
68
SWE-bench Verified
17
57
LiveCodeBench
16
62
SWE-bench Pro
14

Multimodal & Grounded

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

90.9

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

33.4

94
MMMU-Pro
28
87
OfficeQA Pro
40

Reasoning

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

87.7

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

42.1

95
SimpleQA
32
93
MuSR
33
87
BBH
70
82
LongBench v2
44
81
MRCRv2
47

Knowledge

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

70.9

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

30

99
MMLU
30
97
GPQA
29
95
SuperGPQA
27
93
OpenBookQA
25
81
MMLU-Pro
54
20
HLE
5
84
FrontierScience
34

Instruction Following

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

90

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

70

90
IFEval
70

Multilingual

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

86.1

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

61.7

90
MGSM
63
84
MMLU-ProX
61

Mathematics

Claude Opus 4.5

Claude Opus 4.5

93.2

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

47.8

99
AIME 2023
33
99
AIME 2024
35
98
AIME 2025
34
95
HMMT Feb 2023
29
97
HMMT Feb 2024
31
96
HMMT Feb 2025
30
96
BRUMO 2025
32
89
MATH-500
67

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 is ahead overall, 77 to 36. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 99 and 30.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 or Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.9 versus 30. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 60.4 versus 15.2. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 93.2 versus 47.8. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 87.7 versus 42.1. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.5 versus 38.5. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 90.9 versus 33.4. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 90 versus 70. 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 8B (Reasoning)?

Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 86.1 versus 61.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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