Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) finishes one point ahead overall, 31 to 30. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)'s sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 34 against 25.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is IFEval, 68 to 80. LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) is the reasoning model in the pair, while LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct 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 3B (Reasoning) gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct.
Pick Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
34
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
25.7
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
7.2
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
7.2
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
30.4
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
32.4
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
35.3
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
32.1
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
25.2
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
26
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
68
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
80
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
59.7
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
60.7
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
40.9
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
37
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) is ahead overall, 31 to 30. The biggest single separator in this matchup is IFEval, where the scores are 68 and 80.
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 26 versus 25.2. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) and LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct are effectively tied for coding here, both landing at 7.2 on average.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 40.9 versus 37. Inside this category, MATH-500 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 35.3 versus 32.1. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 34 versus 25.7. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 32.4 versus 30.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 80 versus 68. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.7 versus 59.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.