Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 36 to 30. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)'s sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 38.5 against 25.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 39 to 22. 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 8B (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 8B (Reasoning) gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 32K for LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct.
Pick Ministral 3 8B (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 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
25.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
7.2
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
32.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
32.1
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
26
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
80
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
60.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
37
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is ahead overall, 36 to 30. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 39 and 22.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 30 versus 26. Inside this category, MMLU 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 7.2. Inside this category, HumanEval 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 37. 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 32.1. Inside this category, MuSR 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 25.7. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 33.4 versus 32.4. 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 70. 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 60.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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