Compare / R1 vs Ministral 3 8B 2512

R1 vs Ministral 3 8B 2512

Which is cheaper, which is more capable, and which does better at each kind of work, from 17 results on 3 sources that measured both models.

R1
DeepSeek · profile
Ministral 3 8B 2512
Mistral · profile
Results compared
17
Shared sources
3

R1 or Ministral 3 8B 2512? The short answer

  • Ministral 3 8B 2512 is cheaper: $0.15 against $1.15 per million tokens, 7.7 times less.
  • R1 scores higher on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 11.4 against 5.5.
  • On our business benchmarks, R1 ranks higher for agents and tool use, reasoning and knowledge, writing and sticking to the facts.

At a glance

R1Ministral 3 8B 2512
Price per million tokens$0.70 in · $2.50 out$0.15 in · $0.15 out
Blended (3 in : 1 out)$1.15$0.15
Cheapest host, blended–$0.15 (Mistral)
Intelligence Index11.45.5
Spring Prompt overall––
Output speed, tokens a second–103
Context window64,000 tokens262,144 tokens
WeightsOpenOpen
Developer based inChinaFrance

Prices are the developer's list price where we have read it, otherwise the typical host on OpenRouter; see every model's price. Intelligence and speed from Artificial Analysis.

Which is better for what

Each model's rank among models available today, for each kind of work, from our own benchmarks and licensed sources. The better rank is in green.

Use caseR1Ministral 3 8B 2512
Agents and tool useMulti-step tasks with tools: support desks, coding agents, function calls 123 of 161 150 of 161
Reasoning and knowledgeHard questions across science, maths and general knowledge 133 of 195 184 of 195
WritingWhat people prefer in blind comparisons, and judged writing quality 89 of 187 156 of 187
Sticking to the factsSummarising without inventing things, and factual answers 110 of 153 147 of 153

Every shared result

BenchmarkMetricR1Ministral 3 8B 2512
Artificial AnalysisreportedArtificial Analysis Coding Indexindex score 24.69.70
Artificial AnalysisreportedArtificial Analysis Intelligence Indexindex score 11.45.50
Artificial AnalysisreportedGPQA Diamond% of questions 70.8%47.1%
Artificial AnalysisreportedHumanity's Last Exam% of questions 8.5%4.3%
Artificial AnalysisreportedIFBench% of instructions 39.0%29.1%
Artificial AnalysisreportedLong-context reasoning (AA-LCR)% of questions 57.7%25.7%
Artificial AnalysisreportedSciCode% of problems 38.3%20.7%
Artificial AnalysisreportedTerminal-Bench 2.1% of tasks 19.1%4.1%
Artificial AnalysisreportedTerminal-Bench 4.0% of tasks 0.0%0.0%
Artificial AnalysisreportedTerminal-Bench Hard% of tasks 6.1%4.5%
Artificial AnalysisreportedΤ-bench banking% of tasks 6.4%3.7%
Artificial AnalysisreportedΤ²-bench telecom% of tasks 11.4%26.6%
UGI LeaderboardreportedRequested-length error% off the requested word count 18.0%23.0%
UGI LeaderboardreportedStyle adherencescore from 0 to 1 0.300.33
UGI LeaderboardreportedWriting scorescore out of 100 51.828.8
Vectara Hallucination LeaderboardreportedAnswer rate% of documents 97.0%99.1%
Vectara Hallucination LeaderboardreportedHallucination rate% of summaries 11.3%21.7%

Bold green marks the better value on that metric. Where a source reports ranges that overlap, the difference may not be meaningful; see the benchmark page for ranges.

Quick answers

Is R1 better than Ministral 3 8B 2512?

It depends on the task. Among models available today, on our benchmarks and licensed sources, R1 ranks higher for agents and tool use, reasoning and knowledge, writing and sticking to the facts.

Which is cheaper, R1 or Ministral 3 8B 2512?

Ministral 3 8B 2512 costs $0.15 per million tokens (three input to one output), against $1.15 for R1.

Run R1 and Ministral 3 8B 2512 on your own prompt

Benchmarks aren't your data. Try both side by side in the playground, with the cost of every answer.