# Mistral Small vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 31.5 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-small-vs-qwen2-5-72b-instruct
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 25

## Summary

- They share 25 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 7 categories and Qwen2.5 72B Instruct in 2 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in agentic & tool use, where Mistral Small leads 27.9 to 22.0.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 46.8% for Mistral Small and 63.2% for Qwen2.5 72B Instruct.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $1.40 / $5.60 for Qwen2.5 72B Instruct.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 131K.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 33.1 | 31.5 |
| Rank | 238 | 259 |
| Context | 256K | 131K |
| Input $/M | $0.15 | $1.40 |
| Output $/M | $0.60 | $5.60 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 32.8 (#256)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 36.1% | 45.8% |
| LMArena Coding | 1363 | 1293 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 46.6% | 55.9% |
| SciCode | 26.5% | — |
| WeirdML | — | 16% |
| LiveBench Coding | 36.2% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 497.62 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 22.0 (#124)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.1% | — |
| TheAgentCompany | — | 5.7% |
| BALROG | — | 16.2% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 35.8% |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 21.4 (#197)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1336 | 1271 |
| DTBench | 70.9% | 62.9% |
| LMCA | 20.6% | 13.4% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 37.8% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 44.8% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 53.7% | — |
| BIG-Bench Hard | — | 79.8% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 129.01 |
| ForecastBench | — | 57.5 |
| HellaSwag | — | 84.8% |
| LiveBench | 44% | — |
| PIQA | — | 82.6% |
| WinoGrande | — | 82.3% |

## Math

- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 18.1 (#281)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 5.8% | 8.1% |
| LMArena Math | 1341 | 1283 |
| MATH Level 5 | 46.8% | 63.2% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 33% |
| LiveBench Math | 39.9% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 26.9 (#247)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.5% | 49.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1293 | 1245 |
| MMLU | 68.7% | 85.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 63.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 19.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 42.6% |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 94.5% |
| TriviaQA | — | 71.9% |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1142 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 41.2 (#208)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1315 | 1252 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1342 | 1272 |
| LMArena French | 1337 | 1279 |
| LMArena German | 1341 | 1234 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1275 | 1180 |
| LMArena Korean | 1260 | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | 1324 | 1264 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1346 | 1255 |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 65.7 (#216)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1310 | 1254 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 63.7% | — |
| IFEval | — | 80.6% |

## Long Context

- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 38.9 (#183)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1327 | 1282 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 46.9 (#210)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1338 | 1269 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1304 | 1221 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1344 | 1272 |
| WildBench | — | 80.2% |
| LiveBench Language | 30.5% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small better than Qwen2.5 72B Instruct?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.1 to 31.5 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Qwen2.5 72B Instruct?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Qwen2.5 72B Instruct lists at $1.40 and $5.60.

### Is Mistral Small or Qwen2.5 72B Instruct better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (33.5 vs 32.8); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small does, with 256K tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Qwen2.5 72B Instruct share?

25 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Qwen2.5 72B Instruct has 43.