LV
LLMversus

GPT-4.1 Mini vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.40/$1.60. GPT-4.1 Mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1230 vs 1160. GPT-4.1 Mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1240 vs 1185. GPT-4.1 Mini offers a larger 1048K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4.1 MiniMistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.400$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.60$0.600
Context Window1.047576M128K
Max Output Tokens32,7688,192
Arena ELO1,2401,185
Coding ELO1,2301,160
TTFT (ms)190160
Tokens/sec115120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4.1 Mini

Choose GPT-4.1 Mini when you need: 1m token context window at low cost, great balance of speed and quality, strong coding for a mini model, affordable for high-volume use. It excels at chatbots, long-context, cost-sensitive tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window at low cost
  • Great balance of speed and quality
  • Strong coding for a mini model
  • Affordable for high-volume use

Best for:

chatbotslong-contextcost-sensitive
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

Related Comparisons

Claude Opus 4 vs GPT-4.1 MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Mistral SmallGemini 2 5 Pro vs GPT-4.1 MiniGemini 2 5 Pro vs Mistral SmallGPT-4.1 Mini vs O4 MiniMistral Small vs O4 MiniDeepseek R1 vs GPT-4.1 MiniDeepseek R1 vs Mistral SmallGPT-4.1 Mini vs O3 MiniMistral Small vs O3 MiniGPT-4.1 Mini vs Grok 3Grok 3 vs Mistral SmallGpt 4 1 vs GPT-4.1 MiniGpt 4 1 vs Mistral SmallGPT-4.1 Mini vs Llama 4 MaverickLlama 4 Maverick vs Mistral SmallClaude Sonnet 4 vs GPT-4.1 MiniClaude Sonnet 4 vs Mistral SmallDeepseek V3 vs GPT-4.1 MiniDeepseek V3 vs Mistral Small