Phi-4 vs Ministral 3 8B

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

Phi-4 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 42 to 32. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Phi-4's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 55 against 14.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HumanEval, 82.6 to 23. Ministral 3 8B does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Ministral 3 8B gives you the larger context window at 128K, compared with 16K for Phi-4.

Quick Verdict

Pick Phi-4 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Ministral 3 8B only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority or you need the larger 128K context window.

Agentic

Phi-4

Phi-4

38.3

Ministral 3 8B

28.9

44
Terminal-Bench 2.0
26
35
BrowseComp
36
34
OSWorld-Verified
27

Coding

Phi-4

Phi-4

55

Ministral 3 8B

14.2

82.6
HumanEval
23
55
SWE-bench Pro
13
Coming soon
SWE-bench Verified
16
Coming soon
LiveCodeBench
15

Multimodal & Grounded

Phi-4

Phi-4

46.8

Ministral 3 8B

32.4

54
MMMU-Pro
27
38
OfficeQA Pro
39

Reasoning

Ministral 3 8B

Phi-4

31.3

Ministral 3 8B

36.1

30
LongBench v2
38
33
MRCRv2
41
Coming soon
SimpleQA
28
Coming soon
MuSR
26
Coming soon
BBH
63

Knowledge

Phi-4

Phi-4

53.8

Ministral 3 8B

28

84.8
MMLU
28
56.1
GPQA
27
52
FrontierScience
32
Coming soon
SuperGPQA
25
Coming soon
OpenBookQA
23
Coming soon
MMLU-Pro
52
Coming soon
HLE
3

Instruction Following

Coming soon

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

Coming soon
IFEval
69

Multilingual

Phi-4

Phi-4

67.2

Ministral 3 8B

61.7

80.6
MGSM
63
60
MMLU-ProX
61

Mathematics

Coming soon

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

Coming soon
AIME 2023
30
Coming soon
AIME 2024
32
Coming soon
AIME 2025
33
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2023
26
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2024
28
Coming soon
HMMT Feb 2025
27
Coming soon
BRUMO 2025
29
Coming soon
MATH-500
60

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 is ahead overall, 42 to 32. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HumanEval, where the scores are 82.6 and 23.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 53.8 versus 28. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 55 versus 14.2. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Ministral 3 8B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 36.1 versus 31.3. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 38.3 versus 28.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 46.8 versus 32.4. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Phi-4 or Ministral 3 8B?

Phi-4 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 67.2 versus 61.7. Inside this category, MGSM 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.