# Magistral Small vs Mercury

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 30.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/magistral-small-vs-mercury
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 1

## Summary

- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Magistral Small scores higher in 0 categories and Mercury in 2 categories; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Mercury leads 17.5 to 6.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 6.3% for Magistral Small and 21.6% for Mercury.
- Magistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 30.2 | 37.6 |
| Rank | 296 | 199 |
| Context | 128K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.50 | — |
| Output $/M | $1.50 | — |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Magistral Small: 38.4 (#176)
- Mercury: 38.7 (#170)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 35.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1322 |

## Reasoning

- Magistral Small: 6.8 (#350)
- Mercury: 17.5 (#293)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 6.3% | 21.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5% | — |
| CritPt | 0.3% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 3% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1285 |
| DTBench | 61.3% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 133.19 | — |

## Math

- Magistral Small: 26.2 (#261)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 30% | — |

## Knowledge

- Magistral Small: 30.9 (#223)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 56.1% | — |

## Multilingual

- Magistral Small: —
- Mercury: 41.6 (#206)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1260 |

## Instruction Following

- Magistral Small: —
- Mercury: 65.2 (#224)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1239 |

## Long Context

- Magistral Small: —
- Mercury: 38.4 (#198)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1266 |

## Writing & Preference

- Magistral Small: —
- Mercury: 46.2 (#221)

| Benchmark | Magistral Small | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1191 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1282 |

## FAQ

### Is Magistral Small better than Mercury?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 30.2 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Magistral Small or Mercury better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (38.4 vs 38.7); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### How many benchmarks do Magistral Small and Mercury share?

1 benchmark has published results for both models. Magistral Small has 10 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.