# Codestral vs Mistral Medium 3.5

> Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-mistral-medium-3-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 1

## Summary

- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 1 category; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Mistral Medium 3.5 leads 36.0 to 27.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 32.5% for Codestral and 41.4% for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $1.50 / $7.50 for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 40.2 |
| Rank | 290 | 152 |
| Context | 256K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $1.50 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $7.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 27.3 (#321)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1264 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1461 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.8 (#251)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 41.4% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 12.9% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1436 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 141.35 |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1431 |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 40.0 (#126)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | — | 1432 |

## Multimodal

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1223 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1404 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1442 |
| LMArena French | — | 1448 |
| LMArena German | — | 1451 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1385 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1395 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1409 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1415 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1415 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1374 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 993 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1423 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium 3.5 lists at $1.50 and $7.50.

### Is Codestral or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.0 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Medium 3.5 does, with 262K tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

1 benchmark has published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.