# Claude 2.1 vs Mistral Small

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 25.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-2-1-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 4

## Summary

- They share 4 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 2.1 scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Small in 3 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Mistral Small leads 31.0 to 15.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is DTBench: 51% for Claude 2.1 and 70.9% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 25.2 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 345 | 243 |
| Context | — | 262K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 2.1: 26.2 (#327)
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| WeirdML | 7.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1362 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |

## Reasoning

- Claude 2.1: 21.4 (#221)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| DTBench | 51% | 70.9% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1335 |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 119.27 | — |
| ForecastBench | 54.2 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Claude 2.1: 10.2 (#315)
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | 5.8% |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 2.1: 15.4 (#292)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 33% | 47.5% |
| MMLU | 73.5% | 68.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1291 |

## Multimodal

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1340 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1310 |

## Long Context

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 2.1: —
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 2.1 better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 25.2 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 2.1 or Mistral Small better for coding?

Mistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 34.0 versus 26.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 2.1 and Mistral Small share?

4 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 2.1 has 7 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.