# Mistral Large vs Mistral Small 3

> Mistral Large and Mistral Small 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (31.9 vs 31.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-large-vs-mistral-small-3
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 23

## Summary

- They share 23 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Large scores higher in 6 categories and Mistral Small 3 in 2 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Large leads 40.7 to 32.2.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Instruct: 30% for Mistral Large and 45.3% for Mistral Small 3.
- Mistral Small 3 is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.08 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $6 for Mistral Large.
- Mistral Large accepts more context: 131K tokens versus 33K.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 31.9 | 31.2 |
| Rank | 263 | 278 |
| Context | 131K | 33K |
| Input $/M | $2 | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | $6 | $0.08 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Mistral Large: 34.3 (#240)
- Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 30% | 45.3% |
| LMArena Coding | 1277 | 1246 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 38.3% | 50.4% |
| SciCode | 36.2% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | 47.1% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 264.7 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 62.2% | — |
| MBPP+ | 59.5% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Large: 28.6 (#89)
- Mistral Small 3: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 38.4% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Large: 15.8 (#310)
- Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1257 | 1233 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 128.52 | 127.07 |
| SimpleBench | 22.5% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 43.5% | — |
| DTBench | 65.1% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 50.1% | — |
| LMCA | 16.7% | — |
| ForecastBench | 57.1 | — |
| LiveBench | 48.4% | — |

## Math

- Mistral Large: 18.2 (#291)
- Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 8.5% | 6.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1262 | 1240 |
| Omni-MATH | 28.1% | — |
| LiveBench Math | 42.5% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 50.3% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 0.3% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Large: 30.1 (#230)
- Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 51.3% | 47.3% |
| Confabulations | 21.4% | 25.2% |
| LMArena Expert | 1232 | 1202 |
| MMLU-Pro | 59.9% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 4.5% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 43.5% | — |
| MMLU | 80% | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Large: 40.0 (#219)
- Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1237 | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1240 | 1204 |
| LMArena French | 1325 | 1203 |
| LMArena German | 1254 | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1188 | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | 1202 | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | 1257 | 1216 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1268 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Large: 67.9 (#191)
- Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1249 | 1214 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 67.9% | — |
| IFEval | 87.7% | — |

## Long Context

- Mistral Large: 38.3 (#199)
- Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1261 | 1246 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Large: 40.7 (#242)
- Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)

| Benchmark | Mistral Large | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1266 | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1243 | 1195 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 985 | 707 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1260 | 1217 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 69% | — |
| WildBench | 80.1% | — |
| LiveBench Language | 39.4% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Large better than Mistral Small 3?

Mistral Large and Mistral Small 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (31.9 vs 31.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Large 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; Mistral Large lists at $2 and $6.

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

Mistral Small 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.5 versus 34.3 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Large does, with 131K tokens against 33K.

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

23 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Large has 51 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.