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Grok 3 Mini vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.30/$0.50. Grok 3 Mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1200 vs 1160. Grok 3 Mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1220 vs 1185.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3 MiniMistral Small
ProviderxAIMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.300$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.500$0.600
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,3848,192
Arena ELO1,2201,185
Coding ELO1,2001,160
TTFT (ms)180160
Tokens/sec110120
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Grok 3 Mini

Choose Grok 3 Mini when you need: very affordable pricing, fast response times, good for simple tasks, reasoning capabilities at low cost. It excels at chatbots, cost-sensitive, lightweight-tasks tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast response times
  • Good for simple tasks
  • Reasoning capabilities at low cost

Best for:

chatbotscost-sensitivelightweight-tasks
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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