Gemma 3 27B vs Ministral 3 8B

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

Gemma 3 27B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 38 to 32. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Gemma 3 27B's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 45.6 against 36.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 45 to 28. 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.

Ministral 3 8B gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for Gemma 3 27B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Gemma 3 27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you need the larger 128K context window.

Agentic

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

34.4

Ministral 3 8B

28.9

29
Terminal-Bench 2.0
26
42
BrowseComp
36
35
OSWorld-Verified
27

Coding

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

16

Ministral 3 8B

14.2

37
HumanEval
23
16
SWE-bench Verified
16
15
LiveCodeBench
15
17
SWE-bench Pro
13

Multimodal & Grounded

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

41.7

Ministral 3 8B

32.4

39
MMMU-Pro
27
45
OfficeQA Pro
39

Reasoning

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

45.6

Ministral 3 8B

36.1

43
SimpleQA
28
41
MuSR
26
62
BBH
63
47
LongBench v2
38
44
MRCRv2
41

Knowledge

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

34.6

Ministral 3 8B

28

45
MMLU
28
44
GPQA
27
42
SuperGPQA
25
40
OpenBookQA
23
50
MMLU-Pro
52
3
HLE
3
42
FrontierScience
32

Instruction Following

Ministral 3 8B

Gemma 3 27B

67

Ministral 3 8B

69

67
IFEval
69

Multilingual

Ministral 3 8B

Gemma 3 27B

61.4

Ministral 3 8B

61.7

64
MGSM
63
60
MMLU-ProX
61

Mathematics

Gemma 3 27B

Gemma 3 27B

49.4

Ministral 3 8B

43.3

45
AIME 2023
30
47
AIME 2024
32
46
AIME 2025
33
41
HMMT Feb 2023
26
43
HMMT Feb 2024
28
42
HMMT Feb 2025
27
44
BRUMO 2025
29
56
MATH-500
60

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B is ahead overall, 38 to 32. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 45 and 28.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 34.6 versus 28. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 16 versus 14.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 49.4 versus 43.3. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 45.6 versus 36.1. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 34.4 versus 28.9. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Gemma 3 27B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 41.7 versus 32.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Ministral 3 8B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 69 versus 67. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Gemma 3 27B or Ministral 3 8B?

Ministral 3 8B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.7 versus 61.4. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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