# Mistral Small 3 vs o4-mini

> o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3 costs 33× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-small-3-vs-o4-mini
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 21

## Summary

- They share 21 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small 3 scores higher in 0 categories and o4-mini in 8 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where o4-mini leads 40.8 to 16.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 6.7% for Mistral Small 3 and 81.7% for o4-mini.
- Mistral Small 3 is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.08 per million input/output tokens, against $1.10 / $4.40 for o4-mini.
- o4-mini accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 33K.
- Mistral Small 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 31.2 | 41.6 |
| Rank | 278 | 132 |
| Context | 33K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.05 | $1.10 |
| Output $/M | $0.08 | $4.40 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)
- o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1246 | 1368 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.6% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 45.3% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 50.4% | — |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 826.17 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small 3: —
- o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)
- o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | 26% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1233 | 1351 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 127.07 | 145.64 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.1% |
| SimpleBench | — | 38.7% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 58.7% |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 77.6% |
| LMCA | — | 26.5% |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |

## Math

- Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)
- o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 6.7% | 81.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1240 | 1389 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 4.9% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)
- o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.3% | 79.6% |
| Confabulations | 25.2% | 15.8% |
| LMArena Expert | 1202 | 1343 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 19.6% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Small 3: —
- o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)
- o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1198 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1204 | 1354 |
| LMArena French | 1203 | 1364 |
| LMArena German | 1211 | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1111 | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | 1188 | 1312 |
| LMArena Russian | 1216 | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1347 |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)
- o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1214 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |

## Long Context

- Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)
- o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1246 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)
- o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small 3 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1234 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1195 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1217 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 707 | — |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small 3 better than o4-mini?

o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3 costs 33× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o4-mini's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Small 3 or o4-mini?

Mistral Small 3 is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens; o4-mini lists at $1.10 and $4.40.

### Is Mistral Small 3 or o4-mini better for coding?

o4-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.9 versus 36.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

o4-mini does, with 200K tokens against 33K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small 3 and o4-mini share?

21 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small 3 has 24 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.