Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Devstral Small 2 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Devstral Small 2's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Devstral Small 2 leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Devstral Small 2 C

Best for Developers who want a dependable local coding agent on one consumer GPU or a 32 GB Mac

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 75

Watch for

No limitations, safety results, languages or data on the card

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 60
  • Agent interface, 90 against 65
  • Documentation and upkeep, 70 against 46

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Agent interface Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +25

Devstral Small 2 65

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (11,362 characters), with the tokenizer's tekken file for mistral-common. Tool-calling format 25, the card documents tools in the OpenAI function format with an example, names the mistral tool-call parser with auto tool choice for vLLM, shows the same for SGLang, and ships test prompts with the expected tool-call output. Trained tool calling 10, the card says the model excels at using tools, and its tests cover one tool call and calls made one at a time in sequence. Structured output 0, Nothing on the card about JSON or schema-constrained answers for this model. Reasoning control 0, no reasoning mode is documented, and a June 2026 commit removed stray thinking tokens from the files. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, served at 262,144 in its vLLM command. 20 + 25 + 10 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 65.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B 90

The chat template earns 20, a Jinja file in the repository. The tool-calling format earns 25, since NVIDIA documents the format, names the qwen3_coder parser for three runtimes and shows a tool call in its cookbook. Trained tool calling earns 20, with tool-use reinforcement learning and several calls per turn in the template. Structured output earns 5, claimed from training with no instructions. Reasoning control earns 10, thinking off, low effort or a budget per request with the trace returned as reasoning_content. Context earns 10 for 262,144 tokens in the config and up to 1M per the card.

Documentation and upkeep Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +24

Devstral Small 2 46

Model card 11, Intended use, the architecture, the parameters and the context are on the card. Training data 0, Nothing on the card about the training data. Last change 10, the last commit, on 15 July 2026, updated the files to match mistral-common, 118 days before this check and within 180. Responsiveness 10, Of the 23 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (9 December 2025 to 6 November 2026), 11 have a reply from a mistralai member, which is some. Version policy 5, Devstral Small 1.1 stays in its own repository, which this card links as the predecessor, with no dated note on the older card that we read. File health 10, Config, template, tokenizer and card agree, and the June and July commits fixed stray tokens and brought the files in line with mistral-common. 11 + 0 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 46.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B 70

The model card earns 20, all seven items with limitations in the linked subcard. Training data earns 20, datasets listed with sources and token counts and the corpora published. Last change earns 20, counting NVIDIA's own inference code for the model, as on Nemotron 3 Ultra and Nano. The repositories last changed with a card edit on 25 August 2026, but NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM, which the card's serving commands use, changed its Nemotron-H model code on 14 October, 18 days ago. Responsiveness earns 0, with no NVIDIA reply in any of the nine discussions, re-counted on 1 November. Version policy earns 5 as a first release. File health earns 5, since a generation report waits without a reply and one card link is dead. 20+20+20+0+5+5 = 70.

Reach Devstral Small 2 +15

Devstral Small 2 90

Memory 25, the smallest build at 4 bits from a runtime's own library is Ollama's devstral-small-2 at Q4_K_M, 15 GB, and 15 GB × 1.2 = 18 GB, within 24 GB. Mistral's own FP8 files are 25.79 GB. Runtimes 25, Released vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.2 have the mistral3 model, llama.cpp b12242 has the architecture with a GGUF from its own organisation, and Ollama's library has devstral-small-2. Builds 10, one quantised precision from Mistral, the FP8 weights it releases. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 in the card's metadata and text, an OSI licence with nothing added. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Mistral's own API serves Devstral Small 2: the card says the model is available through its API and points there when a local runtime underperforms. 25 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 90.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B 75

Memory earns 10, because the smallest 4-bit build, NVIDIA's 80.3 GB NVFP4, needs about 96 GB with the fifth added, which fits the reference machine but not 64 GB, and Ollama's 87 GB build lands in the same band. Runtimes earn the full 25 from released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Ollama. Builds earn 15 for NVIDIA's own FP8 and NVFP4. Terms earn 10, since the Nemotron licence is custom even though it's free for commercial use with no threshold or use policy. Download earns 10, with no gate or account. Hosted earns 5, since NVIDIA's own API serves it.

Risk Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5

Devstral Small 2 60

File safety 25, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, files in Mistral's verified mistralai organisation, which Mistral's site links to per our Mistral Large 4 listing (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 0, the card has no limitations or safety section, and nothing on prompt injection, instruction priority or what the model refuses. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 has no use policy, threshold or change clause. Security programme 5, mistral.ai's security.txt gives a security contact and a submission policy, as read for the Mistral Large 4 listing (5). 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 5 = 60.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B 65

File safety earns 15, safetensors only but with 10 off because the documented serving commands pass trust-remote-code and the repository ships model and parser code. Provenance earns 15, files in NVIDIA's linked organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation earns 0, since NVIDIA says it evaluated content safety but publishes no results. Agent guidance earns 10, a subcard that names prompt injection and says what safeguards to add, without an instruction hierarchy or concrete mitigations. Licence risk keeps all 15. The security programme earns 10 for the vulnerability submission route on the card and NVIDIA's public bulletins.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDevstral Small 2Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259075Devstral Small 2 +15
Risk20%206065Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Agent interface10%106590Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104670Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +24
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 66.7/100

Facts side by side

FactDevstral Small 2Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorMistral AINVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-152026-03-11
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Devstral Small 2

The easy one to run: a 24B coding agent under Apache 2.0 that five runtimes carry, 15 GB at 4 bits in Ollama, with a 256K context, image input and well-documented tool calling. It's eleven months old, calls tools one at a time, has no reasoning mode, and its card says nothing on limits, safety or data.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Before you call either

Devstral Small 2

  1. ollama run devstral-small-2 is the quickest start, at 15 GB
  2. On vLLM pass --tool-call-parser mistral --enable-auto-tool-choice
  3. Send the system prompt from CHAT_SYSTEM_PROMPT.txt in the repository. The card says results depend on it
  4. Use a low temperature. The repository's default is 0.15
  5. Plan for one tool call per turn
  6. The same model is on our Mistral API listing if you'd rather not host it

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Devstral Small 2 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Devstral Small 2's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Devstral Small 2 leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Devstral Small 2 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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