Ministral 3 3B vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Ministral 3 3B by Mistral or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

MistralMinistral 3 3BOn the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 4.80
Total cost: $12.2

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… scores 4.1 points higher (8.9 vs 4.8) but costs 5.2× as much to run the benchmark ($63.7 vs $12.2; mid-range vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when you need intelligence above 4.8, and Ministral 3 3B when 4.8 is enough.

Metric	Ministral 3 3B	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	4.8	8.9	+85.4% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 85.4% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$12.23	$63.74	+421.2% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 5.2× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	3.32s	10.10s	+204.2% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 204.2% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.10 / $0.10	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs Ministral 3 3B: 85.4% more intelligence, 421.2% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 204.2% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Ministral 3 3B: what beats it NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Ministral 3 3B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.

Ministral 3 3BNVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/ministral-3-3b/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/ministral-3-3b/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill