Noometry

Model comparison

Mercury 2 vs Mistral Small 3.1

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 31.7 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 11 shared benchmarks.

Mercury 2 Inception

39.1

Rank #175 Confirmed

Mistral Small 3.1 Mistral AI

31.7

Rank #269 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 6 categories and Mistral Small 3.1 in 1 category; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury 2 leads 53.8 to 37.0.
  • Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $0.35 / $0.56 for Mistral Small 3.1.
  • Mistral Small 3.1 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
ProviderInceptionMistral AI
Noometry Index39.131.7
Released2026-02-202025-03-17
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window128K128K
Max output50K102K
Input $ / M tokens$0.25$0.35
Output $ / M tokens$0.75$0.56
Results tracked1728

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Category by category

Coding Mistral Small 3.1 leads

Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), Mistral Small 3.1: 38.3 (#179)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Coding13911309
LMArena WebDev1171—
SciCode38.7%—
WeirdML43.2%—
ALE-Bench785.58—

Reasoning Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), Mistral Small 3.1: 19.7 (#254)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Hard Prompts13621278
CritPt0.8%—
Chess Puzzles—1%
Epoch Capabilities Index—127.48

Math Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Mistral Small 3.1: 14.7 (#301)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—3.9%
Omni-MATH—24.8%
LMArena Math—1262

Knowledge Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), Mistral Small 3.1: 22.6 (#271)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Expert13581257
GPQA Diamond—41.9%
MMLU-Pro—61%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.3%—
GPQA (HELM)—39.2%

Multimodal Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Mistral Small 3.1: 33.2 (#99)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Vision—1136

Multilingual Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), Mistral Small 3.1: 41.2 (#209)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Non-English13311255
LMArena Chinese14171253
LMArena Russian13041263
LMArena French—1273
LMArena German—1266
LMArena Japanese—1208
LMArena Korean—1206
LMArena Spanish—1283

Instruction Following Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), Mistral Small 3.1: 63.6 (#230)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Instruction Following13291264
IFEval—75%

Long Context Too close to call

Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), Mistral Small 3.1: 39.5 (#178)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Longer Query13301299

Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), Mistral Small 3.1: 37.0 (#259)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.1
LMArena Text13551277
LMArena Creative Writing12891253
LMArena Multi-Turn13581270
EQ-Bench Creative Writing—761
WildBench—78.8%

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Small 3.1?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 31.7 on the Noometry Index.

Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Small 3.1?

Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Mistral Small 3.1 lists at $0.35 and $0.56.

Is Mercury 2 or Mistral Small 3.1 better for coding?

Mistral Small 3.1 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.3 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Both accept 128K tokens.

How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Small 3.1 share?

11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3.1 has 28.

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