Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) vs Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) finishes one point ahead overall, 36 to 35. 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 (Reasoning)'s sharpest advantage is in multilingual, where it averages 61.7 against 42. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 30 to 71.4. Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 does hit back in coding, 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 Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 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 64K for Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1.

Quick Verdict

Pick Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

38.5

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

31.8

39
Terminal-Bench 2.0
35
41
BrowseComp
32
36
OSWorld-Verified
28

Coding

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

15.2

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

40

24
HumanEval
54.8
17
SWE-bench Verified
Coming soon
16
LiveCodeBench
Coming soon
14
SWE-bench Pro
40

Multimodal & Grounded

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

33.4

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

35.5

28
MMMU-Pro
35
40
OfficeQA Pro
36

Reasoning

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

42.1

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

38.6

32
SimpleQA
Coming soon
33
MuSR
Coming soon
70
BBH
Coming soon
44
LongBench v2
39
47
MRCRv2
38

Knowledge

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

30

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

53

30
MMLU
71.4
29
GPQA
Coming soon
27
SuperGPQA
Coming soon
25
OpenBookQA
Coming soon
54
MMLU-Pro
Coming soon
5
HLE
Coming soon
34
FrontierScience
53

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Comparable scores for this category are coming soon. One or both models do not have sourced results here yet.

70
IFEval
Coming soon

Multilingual

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)

61.7

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1

42

63
MGSM
Coming soon
61
MMLU-ProX
42

Mathematics

Coming soon

Comparable scores for this category are coming soon. One or both models do not have sourced results here yet.

33
AIME 2023
Coming soon
35
AIME 2024
Coming soon
34
AIME 2025
Coming soon
29
HMMT Feb 2023
Coming soon
31
HMMT Feb 2024
Coming soon
30
HMMT Feb 2025
Coming soon
32
BRUMO 2025
Coming soon
67
MATH-500
Coming soon

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) is ahead overall, 36 to 35. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 30 and 71.4.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 53 versus 30. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 40 versus 15.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 42.1 versus 38.6. Inside this category, MRCRv2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 38.5 versus 31.8. Inside this category, BrowseComp is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 35.5 versus 33.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) or Mixtral 8x22B Instruct v0.1?

Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.7 versus 42. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

Weekly LLM Benchmark Digest

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.