Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Gemma 3 27B has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 38 versus 36. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Gemma 3 27B's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 41.7 against 33.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 45 to 30. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) does hit back in agentic, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is the reasoning model in the pair, while Gemma 3 27B 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. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for Gemma 3 27B.
Pick Gemma 3 27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority or you need the larger 128K context window.
Gemma 3 27B
34.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
Gemma 3 27B
16
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
Gemma 3 27B
41.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
Gemma 3 27B
45.6
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
Gemma 3 27B
34.6
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
Gemma 3 27B
67
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
Gemma 3 27B
61.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
Gemma 3 27B
49.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
Gemma 3 27B is ahead overall, 38 to 36. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 45 and 30.
Gemma 3 27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 34.6 versus 30. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 3 27B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 16 versus 15.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 3 27B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 49.4 versus 47.8. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 3 27B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 45.6 versus 42.1. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 38.5 versus 34.4. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 3 27B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 41.7 versus 33.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 70 versus 67. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) 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.
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