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GPT-4o vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $2.50/$10.00. GPT-4o is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1265 vs 1160. GPT-4o ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1260 vs 1185.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4oMistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.50$0.100
Output Price / 1M tokens$10.00$0.300
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,3848,192
Arena ELO1,2601,185
Coding ELO1,2651,160
TTFT (ms)230160
Tokens/sec95120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4o

Choose GPT-4o when you need: fast response times, strong multimodal capabilities, code execution support. It excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

  • Fast response times
  • Strong multimodal capabilities
  • Code execution support

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling
When to Use Mistral Small

Choose Mistral Small when you need: very affordable pricing, fast inference speed, good multilingual support, suitable for lightweight tasks. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast inference speed
  • Good multilingual support
  • Suitable for lightweight tasks

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

Frequently Asked Questions

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