# GPT-3.5-turbo vs Mistral Small

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-3-5-turbo-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 25

## Summary

- They share 25 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-3.5-turbo scores higher in 0 categories and Mistral Small in 8 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Small leads 52.5 to 25.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 15.9% for GPT-3.5-turbo and 46.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $1.50 for GPT-3.5-turbo.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 16K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 23.2 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 350 | 243 |
| Context | 16K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.50 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $1.50 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 23.9 (#331)
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 39.1% | 36.1% |
| LMArena Coding | 1136 | 1362 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 50.6% | 46.6% |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| WeirdML | 3.5% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |
| HumanEval+ | 70.7% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.7% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-3.5-turbo: —
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
| METR Time Horizons | 21.5% | — |

## Reasoning

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 13.8 (#332)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1108 | 1335 |
| DTBench | 48.5% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 9.7% | 20.6% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 3% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Adversarial NLI | 58.1% | — |
| BIG-Bench Hard | 61.6% | — |
| CommonsenseQA 2.0 | 57% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 118.55 | — |
| ForecastBench | 50.4 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |
| WinoGrande | 81.6% | — |

## Math

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 6.3 (#327)
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.2% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1142 | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | 15.9% | 46.8% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| GSM8K | 57.8% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 10.0 (#303)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 28% | 47.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1070 | 1291 |
| MMLU | 71.4% | 68.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 87.4% | — |
| BoolQ | 87% | — |
| OpenBookQA | 86% | — |
| TriviaQA | 85.8% | — |

## Multimodal

- GPT-3.5-turbo: —
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 31.5 (#258)
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1108 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1075 | 1340 |
| LMArena French | 1118 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1090 | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1043 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1019 | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | 1123 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1121 | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 57.9 (#262)
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1119 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 34.0 (#254)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1121 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 25.3 (#305)
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1125 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1092 | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1117 | 1344 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 451 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-3.5-turbo better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

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

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; GPT-3.5-turbo lists at $0.50 and $1.50.

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

Mistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 34.0 versus 23.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 16K.

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

25 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-3.5-turbo has 44 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.