# Mistral Small vs Qwen3.5-9B

> Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.1 vs 33.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-small-vs-qwen3-5-9b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 6

## Summary

- They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 1 category and Qwen3.5-9B in 4 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3.5-9B leads 33.5 to 15.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 5.8% for Mistral Small and 61.7% for Qwen3.5-9B.
- Qwen3.5-9B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.15 / $0.60 for Mistral Small.
- Qwen3.5-9B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 33.1 | 33.3 |
| Rank | 238 | 235 |
| Context | 256K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.15 | $0.10 |
| Output $/M | $0.60 | $0.15 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)
- Qwen3.5-9B: 35.3 (#213)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 26.5% | 27.5% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 36.1% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | 36.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1363 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 46.6% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 497.62 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)
- Qwen3.5-9B: 14.4 (#143)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 9.2% |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.1% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)
- Qwen3.5-9B: 22.5 (#178)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0% | 0.3% |
| DTBench | 70.9% | 71.2% |
| LMCA | 20.6% | 24.5% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 37.8% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 12% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 44.8% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1336 | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 53.7% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 139.45 |
| LiveBench | 44% | — |

## Math

- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)
- Qwen3.5-9B: 33.5 (#174)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 5.8% | 61.7% |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 48.5% |
| LiveBench Math | 39.9% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1341 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 46.8% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)
- Qwen3.5-9B: 46.0 (#77)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.5% | 79% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1293 | — |
| MMLU | 68.7% | — |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)
- Qwen3.5-9B: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1142 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)
- Qwen3.5-9B: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| 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)
- Qwen3.5-9B: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 63.7% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1310 | — |

## Long Context

- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)
- Qwen3.5-9B: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1327 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)
- Qwen3.5-9B: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1338 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1304 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1344 | — |
| LiveBench Language | 30.5% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small better than Qwen3.5-9B?

Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.1 vs 33.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Qwen3.5-9B?

Qwen3.5-9B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Mistral Small lists at $0.15 and $0.60.

### Is Mistral Small or Qwen3.5-9B better for coding?

Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 35.3 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5-9B does, with 262K tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5-9B has 10.