Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Llama 4 Maverick is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 43 to 36. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Llama 4 Maverick's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 56.8 against 33.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMMU-Pro, 59 to 28. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) 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 Llama 4 Maverick 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. Llama 4 Maverick gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 128K for Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning).
Pick Llama 4 Maverick if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Llama 4 Maverick
40.9
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
Llama 4 Maverick
15.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
Llama 4 Maverick
56.8
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
Llama 4 Maverick
54
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
Llama 4 Maverick
36.5
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
Llama 4 Maverick
68
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
Llama 4 Maverick
59.8
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
Llama 4 Maverick
51.3
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
Llama 4 Maverick is ahead overall, 43 to 36. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMMU-Pro, where the scores are 59 and 28.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 36.5 versus 30. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 15.7 versus 15.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 51.3 versus 47.8. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 54 versus 42.1. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 40.9 versus 38.5. Inside this category, BrowseComp is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Llama 4 Maverick has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 56.8 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 68. 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 59.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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