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DeepSeek V3 vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.27/$1.10. DeepSeek V3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1300 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 85 tokens/sec. DeepSeek V3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1280 vs 1185.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Mistral Small
ProviderDeepSeekMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.200$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.770$0.600
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,1928,192
Arena ELO1,2801,185
Coding ELO1,3001,160
TTFT (ms)220160
Tokens/sec85120
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek V3

Choose DeepSeek V3 when you need: excellent coding performance for its price, open-source and self-hostable, very competitive benchmarks, extremely affordable. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks.

Strengths:

  • Excellent coding performance for its price
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Very competitive benchmarks
  • Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source
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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