# Claude 3 Sonnet vs Llama 3.2 3B

> Claude 3 Sonnet and Llama 3.2 3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (29.0 vs 28.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-sonnet-vs-llama-3-2-3b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 15

## Summary

- They share 15 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 5 categories and Llama 3.2 3B in 3 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Llama 3.2 3B leads 32.4 to 10.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 53.8% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 28.3% for Llama 3.2 3B.
- Llama 3.2 3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Noometry Index | 29.0 | 28.9 |
| Rank | 319 | 321 |
| Context | — | 131K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.33 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.6 (#302)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 27.6 (#319)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 42.7% | 23.4% |
| LMArena Coding | 1223 | 1098 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 53.8% | 28.3% |
| WeirdML | 10.2% | — |
| HumanEval+ | 64% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.3% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3 Sonnet: —
- Llama 3.2 3B: 20.1 (#143)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 21.9% |
| BALROG | — | 10.1% |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 20.5 (#237)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 21.0 (#228)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1197 | 1095 |
| DTBench | 53.6% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.7 | — |
| WinoGrande | 75.1% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.7 (#310)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 32.4 (#214)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1213 | 1126 |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.5% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 18.2% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#276)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 29.7 (#235)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1173 | 1090 |
| GPQA Diamond | 40.6% | — |
| MMLU | 75.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 25.2 (#125)
- Llama 3.2 3B: —

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 984 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 37.8 (#234)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 26.2 (#281)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1205 | 1019 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1189 | 1017 |
| LMArena German | 1204 | 1056 |
| LMArena Russian | 1227 | 949 |
| LMArena French | 1229 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1131 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1128 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1204 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 62.8 (#235)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 56.0 (#275)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1199 | 1089 |

## Long Context

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#228)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 33.4 (#261)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1211 | 1100 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.1 (#238)
- Llama 3.2 3B: 24.7 (#307)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1218 | 1110 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1094 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1227 | 1105 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 595 |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Llama 3.2 3B?

Claude 3 Sonnet and Llama 3.2 3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (29.0 vs 28.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Llama 3.2 3B better for coding?

Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher on coding benchmarks: 29.6 versus 27.6 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Llama 3.2 3B share?

15 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Llama 3.2 3B has 18.