Model comparison
Magistral Small vs o4-mini
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 30.2 on the Noometry Index. Magistral Small costs 2.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 9 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 9 benchmarks with published results for both. Magistral Small scores higher in 0 categories and o4-mini in 4 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where o4-mini leads 24.6 to 6.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 6.3% for Magistral Small and 67.6% for o4-mini.
- Magistral Small is cheaper at $0.50 / $1.50 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o4-mini.
- o4-mini accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 128K.
- Magistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Magistral Small | o4-mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 30.2 | 41.6 |
| Released | 2025-06-10 | 2025-04-16 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | 128K | 200K |
| Max output | 40K | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.50 | $1.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $1.50 | $4.40 |
| Results tracked | 10 | 60 |
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Category by category
Coding o4-mini leads
Magistral Small: 38.4 (#176), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| SciCode | 35.2% | — |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.6% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1368 |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 826.17 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |
Reasoning o4-mini leads
Magistral Small: 6.8 (#350), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0% | 6.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 6.3% | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5% | 58.7% |
| CritPt | 0.3% | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | 3% | 26% |
| DTBench | 61.3% | 77.6% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 133.19 | 145.64 |
| SimpleBench | — | 38.7% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1351 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| LMCA | — | 26.5% |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |
Math o4-mini leads
Magistral Small: 26.2 (#261), o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 30% | 81.7% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 4.9% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1389 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |
Knowledge o4-mini leads
Magistral Small: 30.9 (#223), o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 56.1% | 79.6% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 19.6% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1343 |
Multimodal Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |
Multilingual Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1354 |
| LMArena French | — | 1364 |
| LMArena German | — | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1312 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1347 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1321 |
Long Context Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1315 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Magistral Small: —, o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)
| Benchmark | Magistral Small | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1294 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1350 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Magistral Small better than o4-mini?
o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 30.2 on the Noometry Index. Magistral Small costs 2.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Magistral Small or o4-mini?
Magistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.50 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens; o4-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.
Is Magistral Small or o4-mini better for coding?
o4-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.9 versus 38.4 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
o4-mini does, with 200K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Magistral Small and o4-mini share?
9 benchmarks have published results for both models. Magistral Small has 10 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.