# Grok-3 mini vs Kimi K2 (Jul 2025)

> Grok-3 mini and Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.2 vs 41.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/grok-3-mini-vs-kimi-k2
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 30

## Summary

- They share 30 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok-3 mini scores higher in 2 categories and Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) in 6 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) leads 62.3 to 52.5.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Omni-MATH: 31.8% for Grok-3 mini and 65.4% for Kimi K2 (Jul 2025).
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | Moonshot AI |
| Noometry Index | 41.2 | 41.2 |
| Rank | 141 | 140 |
| Context | — | 262K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.57 |
| Output $/M | — | $2.30 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Grok-3 mini: 40.8 (#131)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 42.4 (#102)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 49.3% | 59.1% |
| WeirdML | 42.6% | 42.8% |
| LMArena Coding | 1379 | 1399 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 63.4% |
| GSO | — | 4.9% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 597.5 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Grok-3 mini: —
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 32.4 (#64)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 35.7% |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 59.1% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 59.2% |

## Reasoning

- Grok-3 mini: 13.6 (#334)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 23.3 (#179)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | 64.4% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1375 | 1384 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 140.35 | 146.01 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0.4% | — |
| SimpleBench | — | 26.3% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 16.5% | — |
| ForecastBench | — | 60.2 |

## Math

- Grok-3 mini: 42.1 (#85)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 42.7 (#83)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Omni-MATH | 31.8% | 65.4% |
| LMArena Math | 1386 | 1397 |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 5.9% | 21.4% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 77.8% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 90.9% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 0% |

## Knowledge

- Grok-3 mini: 46.4 (#81)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 37.3 (#157)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 79.9% | 81.9% |
| Confabulations | 10.8% | 20.4% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 67.5% | 65.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1395 | 1365 |
| GPQA Diamond | 76.3% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 17.9% |

## Multilingual

- Grok-3 mini: 48.1 (#145)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 49.6 (#130)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1352 | 1372 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1387 | 1415 |
| LMArena French | 1357 | 1379 |
| LMArena German | 1349 | 1387 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1342 | 1349 |
| LMArena Korean | 1335 | 1325 |
| LMArena Russian | 1353 | 1385 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1381 | 1386 |

## Instruction Following

- Grok-3 mini: 78.5 (#9)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 71.1 (#156)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 95.1% | 85% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1357 | 1348 |

## Long Context

- Grok-3 mini: 41.0 (#147)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 41.2 (#145)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 66.7% | 66.7% |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1372 | 1353 |
| CL-bench | — | 17.6% |

## Writing & Preference

- Grok-3 mini: 52.5 (#169)
- Kimi K2 (Jul 2025): 62.3 (#78)

| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1370 | 1380 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1342 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 73.5% | 85.6% |
| WildBench | 65.1% | 86.2% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1355 | 1371 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1666 |

## FAQ

### Is Grok-3 mini better than Kimi K2 (Jul 2025)?

Grok-3 mini and Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.2 vs 41.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Grok-3 mini or Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) better for coding?

Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) scores higher on coding benchmarks: 42.4 versus 40.8 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Grok-3 mini and Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) share?

30 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok-3 mini has 35 scored results on Noometry and Kimi K2 (Jul 2025) has 42.