Model comparison
Mistral 7B vs Mistral Small 3.1
Mistral Small 3.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.7 to 23.0 on the Noometry Index. Mistral 7B costs 1.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Small 3.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 20 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 20 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral 7B scores higher in 0 categories and Mistral Small 3.1 in 8 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in multilingual, where Mistral Small 3.1 leads 41.2 to 25.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 15.2% for Mistral 7B and 41.9% for Mistral Small 3.1.
- Mistral 7B is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $0.35 / $0.56 for Mistral Small 3.1.
- Mistral Small 3.1 accepts more context: 128K tokens versus 8K.
Side by side
| Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 23.0 | 31.7 |
| Released | 2023-09-27 | 2025-03-17 |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Context window | 8K | 128K |
| Max output | 8K | 102K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.35 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.56 |
| Results tracked | 37 | 28 |
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Category by category
Coding Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 26.4 (#326), Mistral Small 3.1: 38.3 (#179)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1082 | 1309 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 19.5% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 27.3% | — |
| HumanEval+ | 36% | — |
| MBPP+ | 42.1% | — |
Reasoning Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 13.1 (#336), Mistral Small 3.1: 19.7 (#254)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | 1% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1067 | 1278 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 112.21 | 127.48 |
| DTBench | 42.5% | — |
| Adversarial NLI | 47.1% | — |
| BIG-Bench Hard | 56.1% | — |
| HellaSwag | 81% | — |
| PIQA | 83% | — |
| WinoGrande | 75.3% | — |
Math Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 8.1 (#325), Mistral Small 3.1: 14.7 (#301)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 0.3% | 3.9% |
| LMArena Math | 1085 | 1262 |
| Omni-MATH | — | 24.8% |
| MATH Level 5 | 3.7% | — |
| GSM8K | 54.4% | — |
Knowledge Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 7.4 (#311), Mistral Small 3.1: 22.6 (#271)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 15.2% | 41.9% |
| LMArena Expert | 1036 | 1257 |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 61% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 39.2% |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 78.6% | — |
| BoolQ | 87.4% | — |
| MMLU | 62.5% | — |
| OpenBookQA | 79.8% | — |
| TriviaQA | 75.2% | — |
Multimodal Not comparable
Mistral 7B: —, Mistral Small 3.1: 33.2 (#99)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1136 |
Multilingual Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 25.8 (#283), Mistral Small 3.1: 41.2 (#209)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1012 | 1255 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1009 | 1253 |
| LMArena French | 1037 | 1273 |
| LMArena German | 987 | 1266 |
| LMArena Japanese | 878 | 1208 |
| LMArena Russian | 1018 | 1263 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1026 | 1283 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1206 |
Instruction Following Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 54.2 (#280), Mistral Small 3.1: 63.6 (#230)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1060 | 1264 |
| IFEval | — | 75% |
Long Context Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 32.2 (#271), Mistral Small 3.1: 39.5 (#178)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1060 | 1299 |
Writing & Preference Mistral Small 3.1 leads
Mistral 7B: 30.7 (#286), Mistral Small 3.1: 37.0 (#259)
| Benchmark | Mistral 7B | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1090 | 1277 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1068 | 1253 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1062 | 1270 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 761 |
| WildBench | — | 78.8% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mistral 7B better than Mistral Small 3.1?
Mistral Small 3.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.7 to 23.0 on the Noometry Index. Mistral 7B costs 1.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Small 3.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Mistral 7B or Mistral Small 3.1?
Mistral 7B is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; Mistral Small 3.1 lists at $0.35 and $0.56.
Is Mistral 7B or Mistral Small 3.1 better for coding?
Mistral Small 3.1 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.3 versus 26.4 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mistral Small 3.1 does, with 128K tokens against 8K.
How many benchmarks do Mistral 7B and Mistral Small 3.1 share?
20 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral 7B has 37 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3.1 has 28.