# Codestral vs GPT-3.5-turbo

> Codestral is the stronger model overall, scoring 30.6 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-gpt-3-5-turbo
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 4

## Summary

- They share 4 benchmarks with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 2 categories and GPT-3.5-turbo in 0 categories; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Codestral leads 19.8 to 13.8.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $1.50 for GPT-3.5-turbo.
- Codestral accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 16K.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 23.2 |
| Rank | 290 | 350 |
| Context | 256K | 16K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $0.50 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $1.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Codestral: 27.3 (#321)
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 23.9 (#331)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | 39.1% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | 50.6% |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | 70.7% |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | 69.7% |
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| WeirdML | — | 3.5% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1136 |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: —

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| METR Time Horizons | — | 21.5% |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.8 (#251)
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 13.8 (#332)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1108 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 3% |
| DTBench | — | 48.5% |
| LMCA | — | 9.7% |
| Adversarial NLI | — | 58.1% |
| BIG-Bench Hard | — | 61.6% |
| CommonsenseQA 2.0 | — | 57% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 118.55 |
| ForecastBench | — | 50.4 |
| WinoGrande | — | 81.6% |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 6.3 (#327)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 0% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 2.2% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1142 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 15.9% |
| GSM8K | — | 57.8% |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 10.0 (#303)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 28% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1070 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 87.4% |
| BoolQ | — | 87% |
| MMLU | — | 71.4% |
| OpenBookQA | — | 86% |
| TriviaQA | — | 85.8% |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 31.5 (#258)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1108 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1075 |
| LMArena French | — | 1118 |
| LMArena German | — | 1090 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1043 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1019 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1123 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1121 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 57.9 (#262)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1119 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 34.0 (#254)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1121 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- GPT-3.5-turbo: 25.3 (#305)

| Benchmark | Codestral | GPT-3.5-turbo |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1125 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1092 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 451 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1117 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than GPT-3.5-turbo?

Codestral is the stronger model overall, scoring 30.6 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or GPT-3.5-turbo?

Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; GPT-3.5-turbo lists at $0.50 and $1.50.

### Is Codestral or GPT-3.5-turbo better for coding?

Codestral scores higher on coding benchmarks: 27.3 versus 23.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Codestral does, with 256K tokens against 16K.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and GPT-3.5-turbo share?

4 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and GPT-3.5-turbo has 44.