Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Nova Pro has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 38 versus 36. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Nova Pro's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 41.1 against 33.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU, 41 to 30. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) does hit back in agentic, 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 Nova Pro 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 Nova Pro if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning) only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Nova Pro
33.3
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
38.5
Nova Pro
17.2
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
15.2
Nova Pro
41.1
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
33.4
Nova Pro
46.3
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
42.1
Nova Pro
34.2
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
30
Nova Pro
66
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
70
Nova Pro
60.4
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
61.7
Nova Pro
48.6
Ministral 3 8B (Reasoning)
47.8
Nova Pro is ahead overall, 38 to 36. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU, where the scores are 41 and 30.
Nova Pro has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 34.2 versus 30. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nova Pro has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 17.2 versus 15.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nova Pro has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 48.6 versus 47.8. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nova Pro has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 46.3 versus 42.1. Inside this category, SimpleQA 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 33.3. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nova Pro has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 41.1 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 66. 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 60.4. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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