# Mistral Small vs Qwen3.5 Plus

> Qwen3.5 Plus is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.3 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 3.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.5 Plus's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

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

## Summary

- They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 0 categories and Qwen3.5 Plus in 4 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3.5 Plus leads 47.9 to 15.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 5.8% for Mistral Small and 86.7% for Qwen3.5 Plus.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $0.40 / $2.40 for Qwen3.5 Plus.
- Qwen3.5 Plus accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 256K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 33.1 | 42.3 |
| Rank | 238 | 103 |
| Context | 256K | 1M |
| Input $/M | $0.15 | $0.40 |
| Output $/M | $0.60 | $2.40 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| ALE-Bench | 497.62 | 621.92 |
| SciCode | 26.5% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 36.1% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | 36.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1363 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 46.6% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.1% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 0.54 |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: 32.0 (#67)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| DTBench | 70.9% | 80.5% |
| LMCA | 20.6% | 36.4% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 37.8% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 22% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 44.8% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1336 | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 17% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 53.7% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 146.79 |
| LiveBench | 44% | — |

## Math

- Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: 47.9 (#55)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 5.8% | 86.7% |
| LiveBench Math | 39.9% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1341 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 46.8% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 21% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 2.1% |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: 46.0 (#78)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.5% | 84.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | 10.7% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 25.4% |
| LMArena Expert | 1293 | — |
| MMLU | 68.7% | — |

## Multimodal

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

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

## Multilingual

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

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Plus: —

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

## Long Context

- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)
- Qwen3.5 Plus: 42.9 (#109)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Qwen3.5 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| CL-bench | — | 19.8% |
| CL-bench Life | — | 12.4% |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1327 | — |

## Writing & Preference

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

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

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small better than Qwen3.5 Plus?

Qwen3.5 Plus is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.3 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 3.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.5 Plus's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Qwen3.5 Plus?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Qwen3.5 Plus lists at $0.40 and $2.40.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5 Plus does, with 1M tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Qwen3.5 Plus share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 Plus has 15.