Model comparison
GPT-5 Mini vs Mistral Small 3.1
GPT-5 Mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.8 to 31.7 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.1 costs 1.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-5 Mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 28 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 28 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-5 Mini scores higher in 9 categories and Mistral Small 3.1 in 0 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where GPT-5 Mini leads 46.7 to 14.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 86.7% for GPT-5 Mini and 3.9% for Mistral Small 3.1.
- Mistral Small 3.1 is cheaper at $0.35 / $0.56 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $2 for GPT-5 Mini.
- GPT-5 Mini accepts more context: 400K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Small 3.1 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 41.8 | 31.7 |
| Released | 2025-08-07 | 2025-03-17 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 400K | 128K |
| Max output | 128K | 102K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.35 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $2 | $0.56 |
| Results tracked | 60 | 28 |
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Category by category
Coding GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 40.1 (#146), Mistral Small 3.1: 38.3 (#179)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1406 | 1309 |
| SWE-bench Verified | 64.7% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 59.8% | — |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 39.7% | — |
| SciCode | 39.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 52.7% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 799.77 | — |
| AlgoTune | 1.38 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
GPT-5 Mini: 31.1 (#70), Mistral Small 3.1: —
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 34.8% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 55.5% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | -31.18 | — |
Reasoning GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 23.9 (#168), Mistral Small 3.1: 19.7 (#254)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 30% | 1% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1380 | 1278 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 145.52 | 127.48 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 4.4% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 70.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 54.3% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 8.2% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 10% | — |
| DTBench | 80.5% | — |
| LMCA | 34.2% | — |
| ForecastBench | 61 | — |
Math GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 46.7 (#69), Mistral Small 3.1: 14.7 (#301)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 86.7% | 3.9% |
| Omni-MATH | 72.2% | 24.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1378 | 1262 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 46.7% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 12.2% | — |
| ProofBench | 9% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 97.8% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 27.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 6.3% | — |
Knowledge GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 45.6 (#86), Mistral Small 3.1: 22.6 (#271)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 75% | 41.9% |
| MMLU-Pro | 83.5% | 61% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 75.6% | 39.2% |
| LMArena Expert | 1379 | 1257 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 19.4% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 21.6% | — |
| Confabulations | 13.3% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.9% | — |
Multimodal GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 35.6 (#85), Mistral Small 3.1: 33.2 (#99)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1202 | 1136 |
| VPCT | 40.2% | — |
Multilingual GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 48.9 (#137), Mistral Small 3.1: 41.2 (#209)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1363 | 1255 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1385 | 1253 |
| LMArena French | 1386 | 1273 |
| LMArena German | 1366 | 1266 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1341 | 1208 |
| LMArena Korean | 1308 | 1206 |
| LMArena Russian | 1362 | 1263 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1355 | 1283 |
Instruction Following GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 76.2 (#46), Mistral Small 3.1: 63.6 (#230)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 92.7% | 75% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1357 | 1264 |
Long Context GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 41.9 (#132), Mistral Small 3.1: 39.5 (#178)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1355 | 1299 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 69.4% | — |
Writing & Preference GPT-5 Mini leads
GPT-5 Mini: 55.2 (#148), Mistral Small 3.1: 37.0 (#259)
| Benchmark | GPT-5 Mini | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1373 | 1277 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1325 | 1253 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1313 | 761 |
| WildBench | 85.5% | 78.8% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1363 | 1270 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 83.1% | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is GPT-5 Mini better than Mistral Small 3.1?
GPT-5 Mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.8 to 31.7 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.1 costs 1.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-5 Mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, GPT-5 Mini or Mistral Small 3.1?
Mistral Small 3.1 is cheaper. It lists at $0.35 per million input tokens and $0.56 per million output tokens; GPT-5 Mini lists at $0.25 and $2.
Is GPT-5 Mini or Mistral Small 3.1 better for coding?
GPT-5 Mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.1 versus 38.3 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
GPT-5 Mini does, with 400K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do GPT-5 Mini and Mistral Small 3.1 share?
28 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-5 Mini has 60 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3.1 has 28.