# GPT-5 Nano vs Mistral Small

> GPT-5 Nano and Mistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.4 vs 33.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

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

## Summary

- They share 25 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-5 Nano scores higher in 3 categories and Mistral Small in 7 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where GPT-5 Nano leads 29.1 to 15.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 81.1% for GPT-5 Nano and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
- GPT-5 Nano is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.40 per million input/output tokens, against $0.15 / $0.60 for Mistral Small.
- GPT-5 Nano accepts more context: 400K tokens versus 256K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 33.4 | 33.1 |
| Rank | 234 | 238 |
| Context | 400K | 256K |
| Input $/M | $0.05 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $0.40 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- GPT-5 Nano: 33.3 (#248)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1351 | 1363 |
| ALE-Bench | 718.67 | 497.62 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 34.8% | — |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| WeirdML | 38.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-5 Nano: 25.6 (#99)
- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 51.5% | 37.1% |
| Terminal-Bench | 21.8% | — |

## Reasoning

- GPT-5 Nano: 16.4 (#291)
- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 62.2% | 37.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1329 | 1336 |
| DTBench | 62.7% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 7.9% | 20.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 2.6% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 20.7% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | 27% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 9% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 139.39 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.1 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- GPT-5 Nano: 29.1 (#221)
- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 81.1% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1318 | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | 95.2% | 46.8% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 20% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 2.4% | — |
| ProofBench | 12% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 54.6% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 8.3% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 2.1% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-5 Nano: 35.8 (#166)
- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 69.4% | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 10.5% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1321 | 1293 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 11.7% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 77.8% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 67.9% | — |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- GPT-5 Nano: 30.7 (#102)
- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1159 | 1142 |
| VPCT | 37.2% | — |

## Multilingual

- GPT-5 Nano: 45.5 (#167)
- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1313 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1355 | 1342 |
| LMArena German | 1329 | 1341 |
| LMArena Korean | 1269 | 1260 |
| LMArena Russian | 1296 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1360 | 1346 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-5 Nano: 75.2 (#72)
- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1306 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
| IFEval | 93.2% | — |

## Long Context

- GPT-5 Nano: 31.3 (#275)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1313 | 1327 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 44.4% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-5 Nano: 39.4 (#244)
- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

| Benchmark | GPT-5 Nano | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1320 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1250 | 1304 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1311 | 1344 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 705 | — |
| WildBench | 80.6% | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-5 Nano better than Mistral Small?

GPT-5 Nano and Mistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.4 vs 33.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, GPT-5 Nano or Mistral Small?

GPT-5 Nano is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens; Mistral Small lists at $0.15 and $0.60.

### Is GPT-5 Nano or Mistral Small better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (33.3 vs 33.5); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### Which has the bigger context window?

GPT-5 Nano does, with 400K tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do GPT-5 Nano and Mistral Small share?

25 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-5 Nano has 48 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.