# Mercury vs Mistral Small 3

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-vs-mistral-small-3
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 5 categories and Mistral Small 3 in 1 category; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury leads 46.2 to 32.2.
- Mistral Small 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 37.6 | 31.2 |
| Rank | 199 | 278 |
| Context | — | 33K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.08 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury: 38.7 (#170)
- Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1322 | 1246 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 45.3% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 50.4% |

## Reasoning

- Mercury: 17.5 (#293)
- Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1285 | 1233 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 127.07 |

## Math

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)

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

## Knowledge

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)

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

## Multilingual

- Mercury: 41.6 (#206)
- Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1260 | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1204 |
| LMArena French | — | 1203 |
| LMArena German | — | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1216 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury: 65.2 (#224)
- Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1239 | 1214 |

## Long Context

- Mercury: 38.4 (#198)
- Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1266 | 1246 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury: 46.2 (#221)
- Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1191 | 1195 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1282 | 1217 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 707 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury better than Mistral Small 3?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Mercury or Mistral Small 3 better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 36.5 in the Noometry coding category.

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

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.