Model comparison

Mercury 2 vs Mistral Small 3.2

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 30.8 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.2 costs 2.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 0 shared benchmarks.

Mercury 2 Inception

38.8

Rank #167 Confirmed

Mistral Small 3.2 Mistral AI

30.8

Rank #271 Confirmed

Summary

  • The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury 2 leads 54.0 to 45.1.
  • Mistral Small 3.2 is cheaper at $0.0938 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
  • Mistral Small 3.2 accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 128K.
  • Mistral Small 3.2 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury 2 and Mistral Small 3.2 specifications
Mercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
ProviderInceptionMistral AI
Noometry Index38.830.8
Released2026-02-202025-06-20
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window128K256K
Max output50K16K
Input $ / M tokens$0.25$0.0938
Output $ / M tokens$0.75$0.25
Results tracked176

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), Mistral Small 3.2: —

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
LMArena WebDev1170—
SciCode38.7%—
WeirdML43.2%—
LMArena Coding1391—
ALE-Bench785.58—

Reasoning Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), Mistral Small 3.2: 17.5 (#282)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
Kagi LLM Benchmark—40.4%
CritPt0.8%—
Chess Puzzles—1%
LMArena Hard Prompts1362—
Epoch Capabilities Index—131.73

Math Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Mistral Small 3.2: 24.9 (#251)

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—30.3%

Knowledge Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170), Mistral Small 3.2: 26.8 (#249)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
GPQA Diamond—49.1%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.3%—
LMArena Expert1358—

Multilingual Not comparable

Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), Mistral Small 3.2: —

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
LMArena Non-English1331—
LMArena Chinese1416—
LMArena Russian1303—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), Mistral Small 3.2: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
LMArena Instruction Following1328—

Long Context Not comparable

Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), Mistral Small 3.2: —

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
LMArena Longer Query1329—

Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), Mistral Small 3.2: 45.1 (#219)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Small 3.2
LMArena Text1355—
LMArena Creative Writing1289—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing—1255
LMArena Multi-Turn1358—

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Small 3.2?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 30.8 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.2 costs 2.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Small 3.2?

Mistral Small 3.2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.0938 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.

Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small 3.2 does, with 256K tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Small 3.2 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3.2 has 6.

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