Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Ministral 3 8B finishes one point ahead overall, 32 to 31. 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 8B's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 14.2 against 7.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 26 to 33. Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) does hit back in agentic, 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 Ministral 3 8B 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 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning) only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Ministral 3 8B
28.9
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
34
Ministral 3 8B
14.2
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
7.2
Ministral 3 8B
32.4
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
30.4
Ministral 3 8B
36.1
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
35.3
Ministral 3 8B
28
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
25.2
Ministral 3 8B
69
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
68
Ministral 3 8B
61.7
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
59.7
Ministral 3 8B
43.3
Ministral 3 3B (Reasoning)
40.9
Ministral 3 8B is ahead overall, 32 to 31. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 26 and 33.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 28 versus 25.2. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 14.2 versus 7.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 43.3 versus 40.9. Inside this category, AIME 2025 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 36.1 versus 35.3. Inside this category, SimpleQA 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 28.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B 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.
Ministral 3 8B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 69 versus 68. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Ministral 3 8B 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.
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.