Grok Code Fast 1 vs Ministral 3 3B 2512

Across 12 benchmarks in our testing, Grok Code Fast 1 wins 3, Ministral 3 3B 2512 wins 2, and 7 are tied.

Where Grok Code Fast 1 wins:

• Agentic planning: 5/5 vs 3/5. Grok Code Fast 1 ties for 1st of 54 models; Ministral 3 3B 2512 ranks 42nd of 54. This is the most meaningful gap — agentic planning measures goal decomposition and failure recovery, which is critical for multi-step coding agents and autonomous task runners.
• Strategic analysis: 3/5 vs 2/5. Grok Code Fast 1 ranks 36th of 54; Ministral 3 3B 2512 ranks 44th of 54. Neither model excels here — both score below the field median of 4 — but Grok Code Fast 1 handles nuanced tradeoff reasoning more reliably.
• Safety calibration: 2/5 vs 1/5. Grok Code Fast 1 ranks 12th of 55; Ministral 3 3B 2512 ranks 32nd of 55. Both are below the field median (p50 = 2), but Grok Code Fast 1 is meaningfully better at refusing harmful requests while permitting legitimate ones.

Where Ministral 3 3B 2512 wins:

• Constrained rewriting: 5/5 vs 3/5. Ministral 3 3B 2512 ties for 1st of 53 models (with only 4 other models); Grok Code Fast 1 ranks 31st of 53. For compression-heavy tasks with hard character limits — ad copy, SMS templates, UI strings — this is a decisive advantage.
• Faithfulness: 5/5 vs 4/5. Ministral 3 3B 2512 ties for 1st of 55 models; Grok Code Fast 1 ranks 34th of 55. Ministral 3 3B 2512 sticks to source material more reliably, reducing hallucination risk in RAG pipelines and summarization tasks.

Ties (7 benchmarks): Both models score identically on structured output (4/5), tool calling (4/5), long context (4/5), classification (4/5), creative problem solving (3/5), persona consistency (4/5), and multilingual (4/5). The tool calling tie is notable — both rank 18th of 54 — meaning neither has an edge for function-calling pipelines. Both also handle 4/5 on long context (rank 38 of 55), suggesting comparable retrieval at 30K+ tokens despite the context window size difference (256K for Grok Code Fast 1 vs 131K for Ministral 3 3B 2512).

Ministral 3 3B 2512 is dramatically cheaper: $0.10/M input and $0.10/M output, versus Grok Code Fast 1's $0.20/M input and $1.50/M output. The output gap is where real-world costs diverge sharply. At 1M output tokens/month, you pay $1.50 for Grok Code Fast 1 vs $0.10 for Ministral 3 3B 2512 — a $1.40 difference that barely registers. At 10M tokens/month, that's $150 vs $10, a $140 gap. At 100M tokens/month, the difference becomes $15,000 vs $1,000 — a $14,000/month premium. For high-volume production workloads like batch classification, document rewriting, or content pipelines, Ministral 3 3B 2512's flat $0.10/M rate is a decisive advantage. Grok Code Fast 1's premium makes sense only if you're running lower-volume agentic coding workflows where its planning capability (5/5) and reasoning traces justify the cost per task.

Choose Grok Code Fast 1 if your primary use case is agentic coding, autonomous task execution, or multi-step planning pipelines where its 5/5 agentic planning score (tied for 1st of 54) and visible reasoning traces matter more than cost. It's also the stronger choice when safety calibration is a product requirement. Choose Ministral 3 3B 2512 if you're running high-volume content workflows — document rewriting, summarization, RAG pipelines, or any task requiring strict adherence to source material — where its 5/5 faithfulness and 5/5 constrained rewriting scores pay off and its $0.10/M output rate keeps costs manageable at scale. Ministral 3 3B 2512 also supports image input (text+image->text modality), which Grok Code Fast 1 does not, making it the only viable option if your pipeline processes visual content.