# Mistral Small vs Phi-3.5-mini

> Mistral Small has enough public results to be ranked (#238); Phi-3.5-mini does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-small-vs-phi-3-5-mini
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 2

## Summary

- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 0 categories and Phi-3.5-mini in 1 category, but none of those gaps is larger than the uncertainty.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is BigCodeBench Complete: 46.6% for Mistral Small and 38.5% for Phi-3.5-mini.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Microsoft |
| Noometry Index | 33.1 | 36.4 |
| Rank | 238 | — |
| Context | 256K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.15 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.60 | — |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)
- Phi-3.5-mini: 34.0 (#231)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 36.1% | 32.8% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 46.6% | 38.5% |
| SciCode | 26.5% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | 36.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1363 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 497.62 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.1% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 37.8% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 44.8% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1336 | — |
| DTBench | 70.9% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 53.7% | — |
| LMCA | 20.6% | — |
| LiveBench | 44% | — |
| PIQA | — | 81% |

## Math

- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 5.8% | — |
| LiveBench Math | 39.9% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1341 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 46.8% | — |
| GSM8K | — | 86.2% |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1293 | — |
| BoolQ | — | 78% |
| MMLU | 68.7% | — |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1142 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1315 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1342 | — |
| LMArena French | 1337 | — |
| LMArena German | 1341 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1275 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1260 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1324 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1346 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 63.7% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1310 | — |

## Long Context

- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1327 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)
- Phi-3.5-mini: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Phi-3.5-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1338 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1304 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1344 | — |
| LiveBench Language | 30.5% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small better than Phi-3.5-mini?

Mistral Small has enough public results to be ranked (#238); Phi-3.5-mini does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5-mini better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (33.5 vs 34.0); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Phi-3.5-mini share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Phi-3.5-mini has 5.