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Grok 3 vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1185.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3Mistral Small
ProviderxAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.100
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.300
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,3848,192
Arena ELO1,3001,185
Coding ELO1,2901,160
TTFT (ms)300160
Tokens/sec80120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding
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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