Compare / Ministral 3 14B vs Phi-4-reasoning-plus

Ministral 3 14B vs Phi-4-reasoning-plus

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Ministral 3 14B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 60.0 vs 54.4, although their likely ranges overlap, so the lead is not certain. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Ministral 3 14B wins 3 and Phi-4-reasoning-plus wins 0. Both need about 11.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Ministral 3 14B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.20 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Ministral 3 14B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you need math and reasoning
you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you work with long documents
you need image input
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Pick Phi-4-reasoning-plus if…

No clear advantage in the data we have.

Specifications

	Ministral 3 14B	Phi-4-reasoning-plus
Small LM Index	60.0 (likely 56–64)	54.4 (likely 50–59)
Lab	Mistral AI · Europe	Microsoft (Phi) · United States
Released	2025-12-02	2025-04-30
Parameters	14B (dense)	14.7B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~10.6 GB	~11.4 GB
Context window	256K tokens	32K tokens
Input	text, image	text
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	Always thinks
License	Apache-2.0	MIT
API price / 1M tokens	$0.20 ($0.20 in, $0.20 out)	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	294.8K	4.9K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Ministral 3 14B	Phi-4-reasoning-plus
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	≈ 79	76.0
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	71.2	69.3
AIME Math	85.0	78.0
LiveCodeBench Coding	64.6	53.1

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Ministral 3 14B or Phi-4-reasoning-plus?

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Ministral 3 14B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.20 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 11.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Ministral 3 14B has the longer context window: 256K tokens against 32K.

Can I use Ministral 3 14B and Phi-4-reasoning-plus commercially?

Ministral 3 14B is released under Apache-2.0 and Phi-4-reasoning-plus under MIT. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.