Compare / Ministral 3 3B vs SmolLM3 3B
Ministral 3 3B vs SmolLM3 3B
Updated November 2026
Verdict
Ministral 3 3B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 49.4 vs 30.4. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Ministral 3 3B wins 3 and SmolLM3 3B wins 0. Both need about 3.3 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Ministral 3 3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.10 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.
Pick Ministral 3 3B 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
Pick SmolLM3 3B if…
- you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)
Specifications
| Ministral 3 3B | SmolLM3 3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Small LM Index | 49.4 (likely 45–54) | 30.4 (likely 27–35) |
| Lab | Mistral AI · Europe | Hugging Face (SmolLM) · Europe |
| Released | 2025-12-02 | 2025-07-08 |
| Parameters | 3B (dense) | 3.1B (dense) |
| Memory at 4-bit | ~3.3 GB | ~3 GB |
| Context window | 256K tokens | 64K tokens |
| Input | text, image | text |
| Reasoning | Hybrid (thinking on/off) | Hybrid (thinking on/off) |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| API price / 1M tokens | $0.10 ($0.10 in, $0.10 out) | Self-host only |
| Hugging Face downloads (30 days) | 17.7K | 567.6K |
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 3B | SmolLM3 3B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond Knowledge | 53.4 | 41.7 |
| AIME Math | 72.1 | 36.7 |
| LiveCodeBench Coding | 54.8 | 30.0 |
| Multilingual MMLU Multilingual | — | 64.1 |
| IFEval Instruction following | — | 71.2 |
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 3B or SmolLM3 3B?
Ministral 3 3B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 49.4 vs 30.4. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Ministral 3 3B wins 3 and SmolLM3 3B wins 0.
Which is cheaper to run?
Only Ministral 3 3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.10 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 3.3 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.
Which has the longer context window?
Ministral 3 3B has the longer context window: 256K tokens against 64K.
Can I use Ministral 3 3B and SmolLM3 3B commercially?
Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.