Model comparison
Codestral vs Magistral Small
Codestral and Magistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (30.6 vs 30.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 1 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 1 category and Magistral Small in 1 category; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Codestral leads 19.8 to 6.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 32.5% for Codestral and 6.3% for Magistral Small.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $1.50 for Magistral Small.
- Codestral accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 128K.
- Magistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Codestral | Magistral Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 30.2 |
| Released | 2024-05-29 | 2025-06-10 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 256K | 128K |
| Max output | 8K | 40K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.30 | $0.50 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.90 | $1.50 |
| Results tracked | 7 | 10 |
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Category by category
Coding Magistral Small leads
Codestral: 27.3 (#321), Magistral Small: 38.4 (#176)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| SciCode | — | 35.2% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |
Reasoning Codestral leads
Codestral: 19.8 (#251), Magistral Small: 6.8 (#350)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 6.3% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 0% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 5% |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 3% |
| DTBench | — | 61.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 133.19 |
Math Not comparable
Codestral: —, Magistral Small: 26.2 (#261)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 30% |
Knowledge Not comparable
Codestral: —, Magistral Small: 30.9 (#223)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Magistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 56.1% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Codestral better than Magistral Small?
Codestral and Magistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (30.6 vs 30.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Which is cheaper, Codestral or Magistral Small?
Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Magistral Small lists at $0.50 and $1.50.
Is Codestral or Magistral Small better for coding?
Magistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.4 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Codestral does, with 256K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Codestral and Magistral Small share?
1 benchmark has published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Magistral Small has 10.