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

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. GPT-4.1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1320 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 88 tokens/sec. GPT-4.1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1290 vs 1185. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4.1Mistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$2.00$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$8.00$0.600
Context Window1.047576M128K
Max Output Tokens32,7688,192
Arena ELO1,2901,185
Coding ELO1,3201,160
TTFT (ms)260160
Tokens/sec88120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4.1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent coding performance
  • Strong instruction following
  • Competitive pricing for its capability

Best for:

codinglong-contextagentsgeneral-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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