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.
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 | Mistral Small 3.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 38.8 | 30.8 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2025-06-20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 128K | 256K |
| Max output | 50K | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.0938 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $0.25 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 6 |
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Category by category
Coding Not comparable
Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), Mistral Small 3.2: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1170 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Reasoning Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), Mistral Small 3.2: 17.5 (#282)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 40.4% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 1% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 131.73 |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Mistral Small 3.2: 24.9 (#251)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral 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)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 49.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), Mistral Small 3.2: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1416 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1303 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), Mistral Small 3.2: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1328 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), Mistral Small 3.2: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1329 | — |
Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), Mistral Small 3.2: 45.1 (#219)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1255 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | — |
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.