# Mercury 2 vs Mistral Small 3.2

> Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 30.8 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.2 costs 2.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

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

## Summary

- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury 2 leads 54.0 to 45.1.
- Mistral Small 3.2 is cheaper at $0.0938 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
- Mistral Small 3.2 accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Small 3.2 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 38.8 | 30.8 |
| Rank | 167 | 271 |
| Context | 128K | 256K |
| Input $/M | $0.25 | $0.0938 |
| Output $/M | $0.75 | $0.25 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250)
- Mistral Small 3.2: —

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1170 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170)
- Mistral Small 3.2: 17.5 (#282)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 40.4% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 1% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 131.73 |

## Math

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Small 3.2: 24.9 (#251)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 30.3% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170)
- Mistral Small 3.2: 26.8 (#249)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 49.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153)
- Mistral Small 3.2: —

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1416 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1303 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161)
- Mistral Small 3.2: —

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1328 | — |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149)
- Mistral Small 3.2: —

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1329 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151)
- Mistral Small 3.2: 45.1 (#219)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small 3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1255 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Small 3.2?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 30.8 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3.2 costs 2.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Small 3.2?

Mistral Small 3.2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.0938 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small 3.2 does, with 256K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Small 3.2 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3.2 has 6.