# Claude 2.1 vs Llama 3-8B

> Claude 2.1 and Llama 3-8B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (25.2 vs 25.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-2-1-vs-llama-3-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 6

## Summary

- They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 2.1 scores higher in 3 categories and Llama 3-8B in 1 category; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude 2.1 leads 15.4 to 7.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is DTBench: 51% for Claude 2.1 and 43.9% for Llama 3-8B.
- Llama 3-8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Noometry Index | 25.2 | 25.5 |
| Rank | 345 | 344 |
| Context | — | — |
| Input $/M | — | — |
| Output $/M | — | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 2.1: 26.2 (#327)
- Llama 3-8B: 31.0 (#289)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 7.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 31.9% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1152 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 36.9% |
| HumanEval+ | — | 56.7% |
| MBPP+ | — | 54.8% |

## Reasoning

- Claude 2.1: 21.4 (#221)
- Llama 3-8B: 14.3 (#326)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| DTBench | 51% | 43.9% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 119.27 | 116.45 |
| ForecastBench | 54.2 | 58.6 |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1133 |
| Adversarial NLI | — | 57.3% |
| WinoGrande | — | 75.7% |

## Math

- Claude 2.1: 10.2 (#315)
- Llama 3-8B: 8.8 (#323)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | 1.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1151 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 6.1% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 2.1: 15.4 (#292)
- Llama 3-8B: 7.8 (#308)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 33% | 26.1% |
| MMLU | 73.5% | 68.8% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1113 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 82.8% |
| OpenBookQA | — | 82.6% |
| TriviaQA | — | 67.7% |

## Multilingual

- Claude 2.1: —
- Llama 3-8B: 30.8 (#261)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1098 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1076 |
| LMArena French | — | 1159 |
| LMArena German | — | 1104 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 967 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1004 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1109 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1173 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 2.1: —
- Llama 3-8B: 58.4 (#260)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1127 |

## Long Context

- Claude 2.1: —
- Llama 3-8B: 34.2 (#251)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1128 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 2.1: —
- Llama 3-8B: 37.5 (#256)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1166 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1150 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1152 |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 2.1 better than Llama 3-8B?

Claude 2.1 and Llama 3-8B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (25.2 vs 25.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Claude 2.1 or Llama 3-8B better for coding?

Llama 3-8B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 31.0 versus 26.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 2.1 and Llama 3-8B share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 2.1 has 7 scored results on Noometry and Llama 3-8B has 34.