GPT-3.5 Turbo vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mistral Small across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-3.5 TurboMistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.500$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.50$0.600
Context Window
16K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
8,192
Arena ELO
1,120
1,185
Coding ELO
1,100
1,160
TTFT (ms)
150
160
Tokens/sec
100
120
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Fast
  • Widely used

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose
When to Use Mistral Small

Mistral Small excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

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