# GPT-5.6 Sol vs Mistral Small

> GPT-5.6 Sol is the stronger model overall, scoring 64.4 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 30× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-5.6 Sol's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-5-6-sol-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 27

## Summary

- They share 27 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher in 10 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where GPT-5.6 Sol leads 85.5 to 15.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 100% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $4 / $20 for GPT-5.6 Sol.
- GPT-5.6 Sol accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 256K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 64.4 | 33.1 |
| Rank | 6 | 238 |
| Context | 1.05M | 256K |
| Input $/M | $4 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $20 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 61.1 (#7)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 57.1% | 26.5% |
| LMArena Coding | 1493 | 1363 |
| ALE-Bench | 2,177 | 497.62 |
| DeepSWE | 72.7% | — |
| FrontierCode | 47.5% | — |
| CursorBench | 41.7% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1619 | — |
| FrontierSWE | 32.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 89.4% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| MirrorCode | 20% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 50.2 (#7)
- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 51.4% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 27.3% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 46.9% | — |
| PostTrainBench | 36.2% | — |
| BALROG | 60% | — |
| GBAEval | 52.6% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 30.7% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1257 | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 9,619 | — |

## Reasoning

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 74.7 (#6)
- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 67% | 37.8% |
| CritPt | 32.3% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1481 | 1336 |
| DTBench | 96% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 59.2% | 20.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 92.5% | — |
| SimpleBench | 71.7% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 93.8% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 97.5% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 64% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 37.1% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 44.8% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 58% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 93.1% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 161.99 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 85.5 (#7)
- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 100% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1472 | 1341 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 89.1% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 82.9% | — |
| ProofBench | 83% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |
| FrontierMath Erdős | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 64.3 (#16)
- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 93.5% | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.4% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1517 | 1293 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 69.7% | — |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 48.9 (#8)
- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1281 | 1142 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 33.6% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 56.7% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1483 | — |

## Multilingual

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 55.4 (#32)
- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1450 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1523 | 1342 |
| LMArena French | 1475 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1476 | 1341 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1475 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1434 | 1260 |
| LMArena Russian | 1466 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1449 | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 77.8 (#16)
- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1480 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 45.3 (#42)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1479 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-5.6 Sol: 73.5 (#12)
- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1456 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1450 | 1304 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1456 | 1344 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1972 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1250 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-5.6 Sol better than Mistral Small?

GPT-5.6 Sol is the stronger model overall, scoring 64.4 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 30× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-5.6 Sol's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, GPT-5.6 Sol or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4 and $20.

### Is GPT-5.6 Sol or Mistral Small better for coding?

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on coding benchmarks: 61.1 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

GPT-5.6 Sol does, with 1.05M tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do GPT-5.6 Sol and Mistral Small share?

27 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-5.6 Sol has 64 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.