# Mercury vs Mistral Small

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.3 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 9

## Summary

- They share 9 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Small in 5 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Small leads 52.6 to 46.2.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 21.6% for Mercury and 37.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 37.3 | 33.1 |
| Rank | 192 | 238 |
| Context | — | 256K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury: 38.1 (#164)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1323 | 1363 |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

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

## Reasoning

- Mercury: 16.8 (#288)
- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | 37.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1284 | 1336 |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| DTBench | — | 70.9% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

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

## Knowledge

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1293 |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- Mercury: —
- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

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

## Multilingual

- Mercury: 41.7 (#201)
- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1259 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1342 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1341 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1260 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury: 65.3 (#220)
- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1238 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- Mercury: 38.3 (#193)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1264 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury: 46.2 (#216)
- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1304 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1283 | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury better than Mistral Small?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.3 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index.

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

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.1 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

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

9 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.