# GPT-3.5-turbo vs Mistral 7B

> GPT-3.5-turbo and Mistral 7B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (23.2 vs 23.0), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-3-5-turbo-vs-mistral-7b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 35

## Summary

- They share 35 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-3.5-turbo scores higher in 5 categories and Mistral 7B in 3 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in multilingual, where GPT-3.5-turbo leads 31.5 to 25.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 50.6% for GPT-3.5-turbo and 27.3% for Mistral 7B.
- Mistral 7B is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $1.50 for GPT-3.5-turbo.
- GPT-3.5-turbo accepts more context: 16K tokens versus 8K.
- Mistral 7B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 23.2 | 23.0 |
| Rank | 350 | 351 |
| Context | 16K | 8K |
| Input $/M | $0.50 | $0.25 |
| Output $/M | $1.50 | $0.25 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 23.9 (#331)
- Mistral 7B: 26.4 (#326)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 39.1% | 19.5% |
| LMArena Coding | 1136 | 1082 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 50.6% | 27.3% |
| HumanEval+ | 70.7% | 36% |
| MBPP+ | 69.7% | 42.1% |
| WeirdML | 3.5% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-3.5-turbo: —
- Mistral 7B: —

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| METR Time Horizons | 21.5% | — |

## Reasoning

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 13.8 (#332)
- Mistral 7B: 13.1 (#336)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1108 | 1067 |
| DTBench | 48.5% | 42.5% |
| Adversarial NLI | 58.1% | 47.1% |
| BIG-Bench Hard | 61.6% | 56.1% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 118.55 | 112.21 |
| WinoGrande | 81.6% | 75.3% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 3% | — |
| LMCA | 9.7% | — |
| CommonsenseQA 2.0 | 57% | — |
| ForecastBench | 50.4 | — |
| HellaSwag | — | 81% |
| PIQA | — | 83% |

## Math

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 6.3 (#327)
- Mistral 7B: 8.1 (#325)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.2% | 0.3% |
| LMArena Math | 1142 | 1085 |
| MATH Level 5 | 15.9% | 3.7% |
| GSM8K | 57.8% | 54.4% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 10.0 (#303)
- Mistral 7B: 7.4 (#311)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 28% | 15.2% |
| LMArena Expert | 1070 | 1036 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 87.4% | 78.6% |
| BoolQ | 87% | 87.4% |
| MMLU | 71.4% | 62.5% |
| OpenBookQA | 86% | 79.8% |
| TriviaQA | 85.8% | 75.2% |

## Multilingual

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 31.5 (#258)
- Mistral 7B: 25.8 (#283)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1108 | 1012 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1075 | 1009 |
| LMArena French | 1118 | 1037 |
| LMArena German | 1090 | 987 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1043 | 878 |
| LMArena Russian | 1123 | 1018 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1121 | 1026 |
| LMArena Korean | 1019 | — |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 57.9 (#262)
- Mistral 7B: 54.2 (#280)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1119 | 1060 |

## Long Context

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 34.0 (#254)
- Mistral 7B: 32.2 (#271)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1121 | 1060 |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 25.3 (#305)
- Mistral 7B: 30.7 (#286)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1125 | 1090 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1092 | 1068 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1117 | 1062 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 451 | — |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-3.5-turbo better than Mistral 7B?

GPT-3.5-turbo and Mistral 7B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (23.2 vs 23.0), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, GPT-3.5-turbo or Mistral 7B?

Mistral 7B is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; GPT-3.5-turbo lists at $0.50 and $1.50.

### Is GPT-3.5-turbo or Mistral 7B better for coding?

Mistral 7B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 26.4 versus 23.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

GPT-3.5-turbo does, with 16K tokens against 8K.

### How many benchmarks do GPT-3.5-turbo and Mistral 7B share?

35 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-3.5-turbo has 44 scored results on Noometry and Mistral 7B has 37.