LFM2.5-230M vs MiniCPM5-1B

Pick MiniCPM5-1B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. LFM2.5-230M 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.

MiniCPM5-1B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 25 to 17. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

MiniCPM5-1B's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 39.8 against 20.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU-Pro, 20.3% to 48.9%. LFM2.5-230M does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

MiniCPM5-1B is the reasoning model in the pair, while LFM2.5-230M 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. MiniCPM5-1B gives you the larger context window at 131K, compared with 32K for LFM2.5-230M.