# Codestral vs Mistral Small

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

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

## Summary

- They share 4 benchmarks with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 0 categories and Mistral Small in 2 categories; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Mistral Small leads 33.5 to 26.9.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 52.5% for Codestral and 46.6% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $0.30 / $0.90 for Codestral.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.1 | 33.1 |
| Rank | 287 | 238 |
| Context | 256K | 256K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 26.9 (#316)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | 36.1% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | 46.6% |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | 497.62 |
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1363 |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

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

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.1 (#244)
- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1336 |
| DTBench | — | 70.9% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

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

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1293 |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1342 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1341 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1260 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

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

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1304 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Codestral lists at $0.30 and $0.90.

### Is Codestral or Mistral Small better for coding?

Mistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.5 versus 26.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Both accept 256K tokens.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and Mistral Small share?

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