# Granite 4.0 Micro vs Mistral Small

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.0 Micro costs 6.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Small's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/granite-4-0-micro-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 2

## Summary

- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.0 Micro scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Small in 4 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Mistral Small leads 31.0 to 9.9.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 28.3% for Granite 4.0 Micro and 47.5% for Mistral Small.
- Granite 4.0 Micro is cheaper at $0.017 / $0.11 per million input/output tokens, against $0.15 / $0.60 for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 131K.

## Snapshot

| | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 29.0 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 318 | 243 |
| Context | 131K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.017 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $0.11 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1362 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |

## Reasoning

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 19.2 (#265)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1335 |
| DTBench | — | 70.9% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 12.0 (#307)
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.8% | 5.8% |
| Omni-MATH | 20.9% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |

## Knowledge

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 9.9 (#304)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 28.3% | 47.5% |
| MMLU-Pro | 39.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 30.7% | — |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1291 |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1340 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 69.9 (#169)
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
| IFEval | 84.9% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1310 |

## Long Context

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 46.7 (#216)
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1305 |
| WildBench | 67% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Granite 4.0 Micro better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.0 Micro costs 6.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Small's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Granite 4.0 Micro or Mistral Small?

Granite 4.0 Micro is cheaper. It lists at $0.017 per million input tokens and $0.11 per million output tokens; Mistral Small lists at $0.15 and $0.60.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Granite 4.0 Micro and Mistral Small share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.0 Micro has 8 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.