Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Step 3.5 Flash has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 66 versus 63. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Step 3.5 Flash's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 47.1 against 38.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 45 to 34. o4-mini (high) does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Step 3.5 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for o4-mini (high).
Pick Step 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o4-mini (high) only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority.
Step 3.5 Flash
60.2
o4-mini (high)
58.5
Step 3.5 Flash
47.1
o4-mini (high)
38.7
Step 3.5 Flash
66.7
o4-mini (high)
68.3
Step 3.5 Flash
78.3
o4-mini (high)
77.4
Step 3.5 Flash
60.8
o4-mini (high)
61.2
Step 3.5 Flash
87
o4-mini (high)
83
Step 3.5 Flash
82.8
o4-mini (high)
81.7
Step 3.5 Flash
84.5
o4-mini (high)
82.9
Step 3.5 Flash is ahead overall, 66 to 63. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 45 and 34.
o4-mini (high) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.2 versus 60.8. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 47.1 versus 38.7. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 84.5 versus 82.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 78.3 versus 77.4. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 60.2 versus 58.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o4-mini (high) has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 68.3 versus 66.7. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Step 3.5 Flash has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 82.8 versus 81.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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