Model comparison

Codestral vs Mistral Small

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 4 shared benchmarks.

Codestral Mistral AI

30.1

Rank #287 Reported

Mistral Small Mistral AI

33.1

Rank #238 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 4 benchmarks with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 0 categories and Mistral Small in 2 categories; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in coding, where Mistral Small leads 33.5 to 26.9.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 52.5% for Codestral and 46.6% for Mistral Small.
  • Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $0.30 / $0.90 for Codestral.

Side by side

Codestral and Mistral Small specifications
CodestralMistral Small
ProviderMistral AIMistral AI
Noometry Index30.133.1
Released2024-05-292024-02-26
WeightsOpenOpen
Context window256K256K
Max output4K256K
Input $ / M tokens$0.30$0.15
Output $ / M tokens$0.90$0.60
Results tracked739

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Category by category

Coding Mistral Small leads

Codestral: 26.9 (#316), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
BigCodeBench Instruct41.8%36.1%
BigCodeBench Complete52.5%46.6%
ALE-Bench137.78497.62
Aider Polyglot11.1%—
SciCode—26.5%
LiveBench Coding—36.2%
LMArena Coding—1363
HumanEval+73.8%—
MBPP+61.9%—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—37.1%

Reasoning Too close to call

Codestral: 19.1 (#244), Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
Kagi LLM Benchmark32.5%37.8%
CritPt—0%
LiveBench Reasoning—44.8%
LMArena Hard Prompts—1336
DTBench—70.9%
LiveBench Data Analysis—53.7%
LMCA—20.6%
LiveBench—44%

Math Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—5.8%
LiveBench Math—39.9%
LMArena Math—1341
MATH Level 5—46.8%

Knowledge Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
GPQA Diamond—47.5%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—5.1%
LMArena Expert—1293
MMLU—68.7%

Multimodal Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
LMArena Vision—1142

Multilingual Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
LMArena Non-English—1315
LMArena Chinese—1342
LMArena French—1337
LMArena German—1341
LMArena Japanese—1275
LMArena Korean—1260
LMArena Russian—1324
LMArena Spanish—1346

Instruction Following Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
LiveBench Instruction Following—63.7%
LMArena Instruction Following—1310

Long Context Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
LMArena Longer Query—1327

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Codestral: —, Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkCodestralMistral Small
LMArena Text—1338
LMArena Creative Writing—1304
LMArena Multi-Turn—1344
LiveBench Language—30.5%

Frequently asked questions

Is Codestral better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

Which is cheaper, Codestral or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Codestral lists at $0.30 and $0.90.

Is Codestral or Mistral Small better for coding?

Mistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.5 versus 26.9 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Both accept 256K tokens.

How many benchmarks do Codestral and Mistral Small share?

4 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.

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