Grok 4.20 vs Ministral 3 8B 2512
In our testing Grok 4.20 is the better pick for high-stakes, agentic, and long-context workloads — it wins 8 of 12 benchmarks including tool calling, faithfulness, and long-context. Ministral 3 8B 2512 wins constrained rewriting and is dramatically cheaper: $0.15/$0.15 per mTok versus Grok’s $2/$6 per mTok, so choose Ministral when cost or scale is the priority.
xai
Grok 4.20
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$2.00/MTok
Output
$6.00/MTok
modelpicker.net
mistral
Ministral 3 8B 2512
Benchmark Scores
External Benchmarks
Pricing
Input
$0.150/MTok
Output
$0.150/MTok
modelpicker.net
Benchmark Analysis
Summary (our 12-test suite): Grok 4.20 wins 8 categories: structured output (5 vs 4), strategic analysis (5 vs 3), creative problem solving (4 vs 3), tool calling (5 vs 4), faithfulness (5 vs 4), long context (5 vs 4), agentic planning (4 vs 3), and multilingual (5 vs 4). Ministral 3 8B 2512 wins only constrained rewriting (5 vs 4). Three tests tie: classification (4/4), safety calibration (1/1), persona consistency (5/5). Notable rankings and practical meaning: - Tool calling: Grok scores 5 and is tied for 1st (tied with 16 others out of 54) on our tool-calling test, while Ministral ranks 18 of 54. That translates to better function selection, argument accuracy, and sequencing for Grok in agentic workflows. - Faithfulness: Grok’s 5 (tied for 1st with 32 others) vs Ministral’s 4 (rank 34/55) means Grok better resists hallucination and sticks to source material in our tests. - Long context: Grok scores 5 and is tied for 1st (with 36 others) and has a 2,000,000-token context window versus Ministral’s 262,144; expect Grok to retrieve and reason over much larger documents reliably. - Structured output: Grok’s 5 (tied for 1st) vs Ministral’s 4 means Grok better adheres to JSON/schema constraints in our testing. - Constrained rewriting: Ministral wins 5 (tied for 1st with 4 others) vs Grok’s 4 (rank 6/53), so for tight character-limited compression tasks Ministral produced more compact, constraint-respecting rewrites. - Strategic analysis & creative problem solving: Grok’s higher scores (5 and 4) indicate clearer numeric tradeoffs and more feasible creative ideas in our probes. Ties in classification and persona consistency mean both models performed equivalently on routing/categorization and maintaining character in our tests. Overall, Grok’s strengths favor agentic, high-fidelity, and long-document tasks; Ministral is the cost-efficient choice and better for strict compression.
Pricing Analysis
Costs per 1,000 tokens (mTok): Grok 4.20 charges $2 input + $6 output = $8/mTok. Ministral 3 8B 2512 charges $0.15 input + $0.15 output = $0.30/mTok. At 1M tokens/month (1,000 mTok) that’s $8,000/mo for Grok vs $300/mo for Ministral. At 10M tokens (10,000 mTok): $80,000/mo vs $3,000/mo. At 100M tokens: $800,000/mo vs $30,000/mo. The ~40x price ratio (payload priceRatio = 40) means Grok is cost-effective only when its higher accuracy on tool calling, long-context, and faithfulness materially reduces downstream cost or risk; teams with high-volume, low-margin usage should prefer Ministral to avoid orders-of-magnitude spend.
Real-World Cost Comparison
Bottom Line
Choose Grok 4.20 if you need top-tier tool calling, faithfulness, long-context retrieval (2,000,000-token window), or frequent structured-output/strategic analysis in production and you can justify the higher cost. Choose Ministral 3 8B 2512 if you operate at scale on a budget, need excellent constrained-rewriting, or want a balanced, efficient model with vision support and a 262,144-token window—it costs $0.30/mTok versus Grok’s $8/mTok.
How We Test
We test every model against our 12-benchmark suite covering tool calling, agentic planning, creative problem solving, safety calibration, and more. Each test is scored 1–5 by an LLM judge. Read our full methodology.