# Mistral Small vs Sonar

> Sonar is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.5 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 3.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Sonar's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-small-vs-sonar
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 7

## Summary

- They share 7 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 0 categories and Sonar in 5 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Sonar leads 33.7 to 16.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is LiveBench Data Analysis: 53.7% for Mistral Small and 37.9% for Sonar.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $1 / $1 for Sonar.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Perplexity |
| Noometry Index | 33.4 | 38.5 |
| Rank | 243 | 187 |
| Context | 262K | 128K |
| Input $/M | $0.15 | $1 |
| Output $/M | $0.60 | $1 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)
- Sonar: 35.7 (#221)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Coding | 36.2% | 35.1% |
| SciCode | 26.5% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 36.1% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1362 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 46.6% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 497.62 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.1% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)
- Sonar: 21.1 (#227)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Reasoning | 44.8% | 46.3% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 53.7% | 37.9% |
| LiveBench | 44% | 46.9% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 37.8% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1335 | — |
| DTBench | 70.9% | — |
| LMCA | 20.6% | — |

## Math

- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)
- Sonar: 33.7 (#200)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Math | 39.9% | 41.6% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 5.8% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1341 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 46.8% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 47.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.1% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1291 | — |
| MMLU | 68.7% | — |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1142 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1315 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1340 | — |
| LMArena French | 1337 | — |
| LMArena German | 1340 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1275 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1259 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1324 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1346 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)
- Sonar: 71.4 (#150)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 63.7% | 76.2% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1310 | — |

## Long Context

- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1327 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)
- Sonar: 52.6 (#167)

| Benchmark | Mistral Small | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Language | 30.5% | 44.1% |
| LMArena Text | 1338 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1305 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1344 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Small better than Sonar?

Sonar is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.5 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 3.8× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Sonar's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Sonar?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Sonar lists at $1 and $1.

### Is Mistral Small or Sonar better for coding?

Sonar scores higher on coding benchmarks: 35.7 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Sonar share?

7 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Sonar has 7.