Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 36 versus 34. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)'s sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 38.5 against 29.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 39 to 27. Kimi K2 does hit back in multimodal & grounded, 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 Kimi K2 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.
Pick Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Kimi K2 only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
Kimi K2
29.3
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
Kimi K2
12.8
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
Kimi K2
39.5
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
Kimi K2
40.9
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
Kimi K2
29.3
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
Kimi K2
67
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
Kimi K2
59.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
Kimi K2
42.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is ahead overall, 36 to 34. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 39 and 27.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 30 versus 29.3. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 15.2 versus 12.8. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 47.8 versus 42.7. Inside this category, MATH-500 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 42.1 versus 40.9. Inside this category, BBH 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 29.3. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Kimi K2 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 39.5 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 59.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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