LLMversus

GPT-4o 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 $0.15/$0.60. GPT-4o Mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1200 vs 1160. GPT-4o Mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1220 vs 1185.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGPT-4o MiniMistral Small
ProviderOpenAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$0.600
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
16,384
8,192
Arena ELO
1,220
1,185
Coding ELO
1,200
1,160
TTFT (ms)
180
160
Tokens/sec
120
120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use GPT-4o Mini

Choose GPT-4o Mini when you need: extremely affordable pricing, fast response times, strong for its price tier, good multimodal support. It excels at chatbots, lightweight-tasks, cost-sensitive tasks.

Strengths:

  • Extremely affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Strong for its price tier
  • Good multimodal support

Best for:

chatbotslightweight-taskscost-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-4o MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Mistral SmallGemini 2 5 Pro vs GPT-4o MiniGemini 2 5 Pro vs Mistral SmallGPT-4o Mini vs O3Mistral Small vs O3Deepseek R1 vs GPT-4o MiniDeepseek R1 vs Mistral SmallGPT-4o Mini vs O1Mistral Small vs O1GPT-4o Mini vs Qwen 3 235bMistral Small vs Qwen 3 235bGemini Exp 1206 vs GPT-4o MiniGemini Exp 1206 vs Mistral SmallGpt 4 5 vs GPT-4o MiniGpt 4 5 vs Mistral SmallGPT-4o Mini vs Groq Deepseek R1Groq Deepseek R1 vs Mistral SmallGPT-4o Mini vs Llama 4 MaverickLlama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Small