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Mistral Small vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1185. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureMistral Smallo4-mini
ProviderMistralOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.100$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.300$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens8,192100,000
Arena ELO1,1851,350
Coding ELO1,1601,380
TTFT (ms)1601,200
Tokens/sec12060
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
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
When to Use o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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