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GPT-4 1.5-mini vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

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 $0.40/$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.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4 1.5-miniMistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.400$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.60$0.600
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
4,096
8,192
Arena ELO
1,180
1,185
Coding ELO
1,200
1,160
TTFT (ms)
140
160
Tokens/sec
120
120
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use GPT-4 1.5-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:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Large context

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose
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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