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 27. 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 22.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 39 to 19.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is the reasoning model in the pair, while Ministral 3 3B 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 (Reasoning) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 3B only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
Ministral 3 3B
22.9
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
Ministral 3 3B
6.2
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
Ministral 3 3B
30.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
Ministral 3 3B
30.1
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
Ministral 3 3B
24.5
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
Ministral 3 3B
67
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
Ministral 3 3B
59.7
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
Ministral 3 3B
36
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is ahead overall, 36 to 27. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 39 and 19.
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 30 versus 24.5. 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 6.2. 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 36. 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 30.1. 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 22.9. 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 30.4. 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 67. 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 59.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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