# Mercury 2 vs Mistral Small

> Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 15

## Summary

- They share 15 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 6 categories and Mistral Small in 1 category; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Mercury 2 leads 36.2 to 31.0.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is SciCode: 38.7% for Mercury 2 and 26.5% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 175 | 243 |
| Context | 128K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.25 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $0.75 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255)
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.7% | 26.5% |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1362 |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | 497.62 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0.8% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1335 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| DTBench | — | 70.9% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 5.8% |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1291 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.5% |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157)
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | 1340 |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | 1324 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1259 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165)
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155)
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Small?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index.

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

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.

### Is Mercury 2 or Mistral Small better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (33.5 vs 34.0); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

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

15 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.