Noometry

Model comparison

Magistral Medium vs Qwen3 8B

Magistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.2 to 33.7 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3 8B costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Magistral Medium's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 2 shared benchmarks.

Magistral Medium Mistral AI

35.2

Rank #227 Confirmed

Qwen3 8B Alibaba (Qwen)

33.7

Rank #238 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Magistral Medium scores higher in 3 categories and Qwen3 8B in 2 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen3 8B leads 16.6 to 8.6.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is SciCode: 39.2% for Magistral Medium and 22.6% for Qwen3 8B.
  • Qwen3 8B is cheaper at $0.18 / $0.70 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $5 for Magistral Medium.
  • Magistral Medium accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 131K.

Side by side

Magistral MediumQwen3 8B
ProviderMistral AIAlibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index35.233.7
Released2025-03-172025-04
WeightsOpenOpen
Context window262K131K
Max output16K8K
Input $ / M tokens$2$0.18
Output $ / M tokens$5$0.70
Results tracked2211

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Category by category

Coding Magistral Medium leads

Magistral Medium: 39.1 (#161), Qwen3 8B: 34.0 (#248)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
SciCode39.2%22.6%
LMArena Coding1319—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Magistral Medium: —, Qwen3 8B: 30.2 (#78)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—42.6%

Reasoning Qwen3 8B leads

Magistral Medium: 8.6 (#348), Qwen3 8B: 16.6 (#303)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
CritPt0.3%0%
ARC-AGI-20%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark16.2%—
ARC-AGI-16.1%—
Chess Puzzles—5%
LMArena Hard Prompts1267—
DTBench—59.7%
LMCA—8.8%
Epoch Capabilities Index—136.17

Math Too close to call

Magistral Medium: 35.1 (#189), Qwen3 8B: 34.9 (#191)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—56.1%
LMArena Math1250—

Knowledge Qwen3 8B leads

Magistral Medium: 33.5 (#202), Qwen3 8B: 36.1 (#173)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
GPQA Diamond—56.8%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—4.8%
LMArena Expert1223—

Multilingual Not comparable

Magistral Medium: 39.6 (#224), Qwen3 8B: —

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
LMArena Non-English1232—
LMArena Chinese1227—
LMArena French1267—
LMArena German1248—
LMArena Japanese1175—
LMArena Korean1125—
LMArena Russian1224—
LMArena Spanish1271—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Magistral Medium: 66.0 (#211), Qwen3 8B: —

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
LMArena Instruction Following1254—

Long Context Magistral Medium leads

Magistral Medium: 39.3 (#183), Qwen3 8B: 37.9 (#210)

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
Fiction.LiveBench—62.1%
LMArena Longer Query1295—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Magistral Medium: 46.3 (#219), Qwen3 8B: —

BenchmarkMagistral MediumQwen3 8B
LMArena Text1255—
LMArena Creative Writing1245—
LMArena Multi-Turn1275—

Frequently asked questions

Is Magistral Medium better than Qwen3 8B?

Magistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.2 to 33.7 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3 8B costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Magistral Medium's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Magistral Medium or Qwen3 8B?

Qwen3 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens; Magistral Medium lists at $2 and $5.

Is Magistral Medium or Qwen3 8B better for coding?

Magistral Medium scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.1 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Magistral Medium does, with 262K tokens against 131K.

How many benchmarks do Magistral Medium and Qwen3 8B share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Magistral Medium has 22 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3 8B has 11.

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