# Codestral vs Ministral 8B

> Codestral is the stronger model overall, scoring 30.1 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 8B costs 4.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Codestral's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-ministral-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in coding, where Ministral 8B leads 34.4 to 26.9.
- Ministral 8B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.10 per million input/output tokens, against $0.30 / $0.90 for Codestral.
- Codestral accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 128K.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.1 | 27.8 |
| Rank | 287 | 321 |
| Context | 256K | 128K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $0.10 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $0.10 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 26.9 (#316)
- Ministral 8B: 34.4 (#226)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1202 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 16.2 (#140)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 11.1% |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.1 (#244)
- Ministral 8B: 17.7 (#279)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1191 |
| DTBench | — | 45.7% |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 23.7 (#262)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1188 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 14.9% |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 12.5 (#292)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 27.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 7.4% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1170 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 35.3 (#242)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1165 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1193 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1195 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 60.7 (#245)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1161 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 36.7 (#222)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1212 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Ministral 8B: 39.8 (#241)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1191 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1175 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1166 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Ministral 8B?

Codestral is the stronger model overall, scoring 30.1 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 8B costs 4.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Codestral's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Ministral 8B?

Ministral 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens; Codestral lists at $0.30 and $0.90.

### Is Codestral or Ministral 8B better for coding?

Ministral 8B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 34.4 versus 26.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Codestral does, with 256K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and Ministral 8B share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 8B has 17.