Model comparison
Mercury vs Mistral Small 3
Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.
Last verified . 8 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 5 categories and Mistral Small 3 in 1 category; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury leads 46.2 to 32.2.
- Mistral Small 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury | Mistral Small 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 37.6 | 31.2 |
| Released | — | 2025-01-30 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | — | 33K |
| Max output | — | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.05 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $0.08 |
| Results tracked | 9 | 24 |
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Category by category
Coding Mercury leads
Mercury: 38.7 (#170), Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1322 | 1246 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 45.3% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 50.4% |
Reasoning Mistral Small 3 leads
Mercury: 17.5 (#293), Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1285 | 1233 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 127.07 |
Math Not comparable
Mercury: —, Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 6.7% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1240 |
Knowledge Not comparable
Mercury: —, Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.3% |
| Confabulations | — | 25.2% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1202 |
Multilingual Mercury leads
Mercury: 41.6 (#206), Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1260 | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1204 |
| LMArena French | — | 1203 |
| LMArena German | — | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1216 |
Instruction Following Mercury leads
Mercury: 65.2 (#224), Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1239 | 1214 |
Long Context Too close to call
Mercury: 38.4 (#198), Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1266 | 1246 |
Writing & Preference Mercury leads
Mercury: 46.2 (#221), Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)
| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1191 | 1195 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1282 | 1217 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 707 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury better than Mistral Small 3?
Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.
Is Mercury or Mistral Small 3 better for coding?
Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 36.5 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Mercury and Mistral Small 3 share?
8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.