# gpt-oss-20b vs StarCoder 2 3B

> gpt-oss-20b has enough public results to be ranked (#255); StarCoder 2 3B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-oss-20b-vs-starcoder-2-3b
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 1

## Summary

- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. gpt-oss-20b scores higher in 1 category and StarCoder 2 3B in 0 categories; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where gpt-oss-20b leads 37.6 to 33.5.

## Snapshot

| | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 32.5 | 36.3 |
| Rank | 255 | — |
| Context | 131K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.018 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.09 | — |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- gpt-oss-20b: 37.6 (#192)
- StarCoder 2 3B: 33.5

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 34.4% | — |
| WeirdML | 40.9% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1306 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 21.4% |
| ALE-Bench | 566.05 | — |
| HumanEval+ | — | 27.4% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- gpt-oss-20b: 9.3 (#154)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 3.4% | — |

## Reasoning

- gpt-oss-20b: 19.3 (#261)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 137.82 | 88.76 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 53.2% | — |
| CritPt | 1.4% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 4% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1274 | — |
| DTBench | 68% | — |
| LMCA | 14.5% | — |
| WinoGrande | — | 57.1% |

## Math

- gpt-oss-20b: 39.4 (#103)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 65.3% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 56.5% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1317 | — |
| GSM8K | — | 21.6% |

## Knowledge

- gpt-oss-20b: 34.6 (#195)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 60.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 74% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 59.4% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1258 | — |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 34.2% |
| MMLU | — | 36.6% |

## Multilingual

- gpt-oss-20b: 42.2 (#197)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1268 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1314 | — |
| LMArena German | 1255 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1244 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1236 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1278 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1267 | — |

## Instruction Following

- gpt-oss-20b: 61.8 (#240)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 73.2% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1236 | — |

## Long Context

- gpt-oss-20b: 37.9 (#209)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1250 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- gpt-oss-20b: 35.5 (#265)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | gpt-oss-20b | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1287 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1201 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 666 | — |
| WildBench | 73.7% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1268 | — |

## FAQ

### Is gpt-oss-20b better than StarCoder 2 3B?

gpt-oss-20b has enough public results to be ranked (#255); StarCoder 2 3B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Is gpt-oss-20b or StarCoder 2 3B better for coding?

gpt-oss-20b scores higher on coding benchmarks: 37.6 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do gpt-oss-20b and StarCoder 2 3B share?

1 benchmark has published results for both models. gpt-oss-20b has 34 scored results on Noometry and StarCoder 2 3B has 7.