Which is cheaper, DeepSeek V3 or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper for both input ($0.10/M tokens) and output ($0.30/M tokens), compared to DeepSeek V3 at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens.

Which is faster, DeepSeek V3 or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 160ms, compared to DeepSeek V3 at 85 tokens/sec and 220ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, DeepSeek V3 or Mistral Small?

DeepSeek V3 has a 128K token context window, which is equal to Mistral Small's 128K context window.

Which is better for coding, DeepSeek V3 or Mistral Small?

DeepSeek V3 has a higher coding ELO of 1300 compared to Mistral Small's 1160, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

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

Name: DeepSeek V3 vs Mistral Small — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

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.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	DeepSeek V3	Mistral Small
Provider	DeepSeek	Mistral
Input Price / 1M tokens	$0.259	$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens	$0.420	$0.600
Context Window	128K	128K
Max Output Tokens	8,192	8,192
Arena ELO	1,280	1,185
Coding ELO	1,300	1,160
TTFT (ms)	220	160
Tokens/sec	85	120
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
Vision	No	No

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

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

Side-by-Side Comparison

Frequently Asked Questions

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