Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or o4-mini?

Mistral Small is cheaper for both input ($0.10/M tokens) and output ($0.30/M tokens), compared to o4-mini at $1.10/$4.40 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Mistral Small or o4-mini?

Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 160ms, compared to o4-mini at 60 tokens/sec and 1200ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, Mistral Small or o4-mini?

o4-mini has a 200K token context window, which is larger Mistral Small's 128K context window.

Which is better for coding, Mistral Small or o4-mini?

o4-mini has a higher coding ELO of 1380 compared to Mistral Small's 1160, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

Mistral Small vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: Mistral Small vs o4-mini — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Sep 14, 2026By LLMversusUpdated September 17, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1185. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Mistral Small	o4-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	32,768
Arena ELO	1,185	1,260
Coding ELO	1,160	1,270
TTFT (ms)	160	180
Tokens/sec	120	105
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
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 o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a 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:

Affordable
Fast
Good reasoning

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Mistral Small vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

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