# Mercury 2.5 vs Mistral Small 3

> Mistral Small 3 has enough public results to be ranked (#268); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-5-vs-mistral-small-3
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in math, where Mercury 2.5 leads 22.4 to 15.3.
- Mistral Small 3 is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.08 per million input/output tokens, against $0.04 / $0.15 for Mercury 2.5.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts more context: 260K tokens versus 33K.
- Mistral Small 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.2 | 30.9 |
| Rank | — | 268 |
| Context | 260K | 33K |
| Input $/M | $0.04 | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | $0.15 | $0.08 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 36.0 (#203)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 45.3% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1246 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 50.4% |
| ALE-Bench | 301.65 | — |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 18.2 (#269)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1233 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 127.06 |

## Math

- Mercury 2.5: 22.4
- Mistral Small 3: 15.3 (#290)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 6.7% |
| ProofBench | 3% | — |
| LMArena Math | — | 1240 |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 25.0 (#258)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.3% |
| Confabulations | — | 25.2% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1202 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 37.5 (#231)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1204 |
| LMArena French | — | 1202 |
| LMArena German | — | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1216 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 63.9 (#224)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1214 |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#206)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1246 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Mistral Small 3: 32.4 (#275)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1195 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 707 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1217 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2.5 better than Mistral Small 3?

Mistral Small 3 has enough public results to be ranked (#268); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2.5 or Mistral Small 3?

Mistral Small 3 is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens; Mercury 2.5 lists at $0.04 and $0.15.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mercury 2.5 does, with 260K tokens against 33K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2.5 and Mistral Small 3 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2.5 has 2 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.