Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or o3-mini?

Mistral Small is cheaper for both input ($0.10/M tokens) and output ($0.30/M tokens), compared to o3-mini at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Mistral Small or o3-mini?

Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 160ms, compared to o3-mini at 55 tokens/sec and 1500ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, Mistral Small or o3-mini?

o3-mini has a 200K token context window, which is larger Mistral Small's 128K context window.

Which is better for coding, Mistral Small or o3-mini?

o3-mini has a higher coding ELO of 1340 compared to Mistral Small's 1160, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

Mistral Small vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: Mistral Small vs o3-mini — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Aug 3, 2026By LLMversusUpdated August 8, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1185. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: August 3, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Mistral Small	o3-mini
Provider	Mistral	OpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens	$0.150	$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens	$0.600	$4.40
Context Window	128K	128K
Max Output Tokens	8,192	65,536
Arena ELO	1,185	1,348
Coding ELO	1,160	1,348
TTFT (ms)	160	350
Tokens/sec	120	25
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	No
Vision	No	No

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

When to Use o3-mini

Choose o3-mini when you need: strong mathematical reasoning, good coding performance, affordable reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

Strong reasoning
Good math skills
Affordable reasoning

Best for:

reasoningmathgeneral-purpose

Mistral Small vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons