# Codestral vs Magistral Medium

> Magistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.2 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Magistral Medium's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-magistral-medium
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 1

## Summary

- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 1 category and Magistral Medium in 1 category; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Magistral Medium leads 39.1 to 27.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 32.5% for Codestral and 16.2% for Magistral Medium.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $5 for Magistral Medium.
- Magistral Medium accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.
- Magistral Medium has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 35.2 |
| Rank | 290 | 227 |
| Context | 256K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $2 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $5 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 27.3 (#321)
- Magistral Medium: 39.1 (#161)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| SciCode | — | 39.2% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1319 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.8 (#251)
- Magistral Medium: 8.6 (#348)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 16.2% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 0% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 6.1% |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1267 |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 35.1 (#189)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1250 |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 33.5 (#202)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | — | 1223 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 39.6 (#224)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1232 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1227 |
| LMArena French | — | 1267 |
| LMArena German | — | 1248 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1175 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1125 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1224 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1271 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 66.0 (#211)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1254 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 39.3 (#183)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1295 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Magistral Medium: 46.3 (#219)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1255 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1245 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1275 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Magistral Medium?

Magistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.2 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Magistral Medium's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Magistral Medium?

Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Magistral Medium lists at $2 and $5.

### Is Codestral or Magistral Medium better for coding?

Magistral Medium scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.1 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Magistral Medium does, with 262K tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and Magistral Medium share?

1 benchmark has published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Magistral Medium has 22.