# Mistral Medium vs Sonar

> Sonar is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.8 to 36.0 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-medium-vs-sonar
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Medium leads 60.2 to 52.6.
- Sonar is cheaper at $1 / $1 per million input/output tokens, against $1.50 / $7.50 for Mistral Medium.
- Mistral Medium accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Medium has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Perplexity |
| Noometry Index | 36.0 | 37.8 |
| Rank | 211 | 184 |
| Context | 262K | 128K |
| Input $/M | $1.50 | $1 |
| Output $/M | $7.50 | $1 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mistral Medium: 33.8 (#241)
- Sonar: 35.1 (#217)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierCode | 8% | — |
| SciCode | 40.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.7% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 35.1% |
| LMArena Coding | 1434 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 763.98 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Medium: 28.1 (#84)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.7% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Medium: 23.3 (#165)
- Sonar: 20.3 (#221)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 50% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 46.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1426 | — |
| DTBench | 75.5% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 37.9% |
| LMCA | 26.1% | — |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 26.9% | — |
| LiveBench | — | 46.9% |

## Math

- Mistral Medium: 27.2 (#238)
- Sonar: 31.3 (#197)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 32.2% | — |
| ProofBench | 9% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 41.6% |
| LMArena Math | 1409 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 81.6% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 0.3% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Medium: 24.9 (#260)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 59.5% | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 4.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 22.7% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1408 | — |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Medium: 34.6 (#82)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1172 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Medium: 52.3 (#86)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1408 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1448 | — |
| LMArena French | 1460 | — |
| LMArena German | 1433 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1378 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1382 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1411 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1433 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Medium: 73.9 (#111)
- Sonar: 71.5 (#146)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 76.2% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1398 | — |

## Long Context

- Mistral Medium: 42.9 (#108)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1406 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Medium: 60.2 (#97)
- Sonar: 52.6 (#166)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1424 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1391 | — |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 77.3% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1418 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 44.1% |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Medium better than Sonar?

Sonar is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.8 to 36.0 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Medium or Sonar?

Sonar is cheaper. It lists at $1 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium lists at $1.50 and $7.50.

### Is Mistral Medium or Sonar better for coding?

Sonar scores higher on coding benchmarks: 35.1 versus 33.8 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

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

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Medium and Sonar share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Medium has 36 scored results on Noometry and Sonar has 7.