# Codestral vs StarCoder 2 3B

> Codestral has enough public results to be ranked (#290); StarCoder 2 3B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-starcoder-2-3b
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 2

## Summary

- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 0 categories and StarCoder 2 3B in 1 category; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where StarCoder 2 3B leads 33.5 to 27.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 52.5% for Codestral and 21.4% for StarCoder 2 3B.
- StarCoder 2 3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 36.3 |
| Rank | 290 | — |
| Context | 256K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 27.3 (#321)
- StarCoder 2 3B: 33.5

| Benchmark | Codestral | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | 21.4% |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | 27.4% |
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.8 (#251)
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | Codestral | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 88.76 |
| WinoGrande | — | 57.1% |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | Codestral | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| GSM8K | — | 21.6% |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- StarCoder 2 3B: —

| Benchmark | Codestral | StarCoder 2 3B |
|---|---|---|
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 34.2% |
| MMLU | — | 36.6% |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than StarCoder 2 3B?

Codestral has enough public results to be ranked (#290); StarCoder 2 3B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Is Codestral or StarCoder 2 3B better for coding?

StarCoder 2 3B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.5 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and StarCoder 2 3B share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and StarCoder 2 3B has 7.