Model comparison

GPT-5.6 Sol vs Mistral Small

GPT-5.6 Sol is the stronger model overall, scoring 64.4 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 30× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-5.6 Sol's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified October 10, 2026. 27 shared benchmarks.

GPT-5.6 Sol OpenAI

64.4

Rank #6 Confirmed

Mistral Small

Mistral AI

33.1

Rank #238 Confirmed

Summary

They share 27 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher in 10 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
The widest gap is in math, where GPT-5.6 Sol leads 85.5 to 15.4.
The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 100% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $4 / $20 for GPT-5.6 Sol.
GPT-5.6 Sol accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 256K.
Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

GPT-5.6 Sol and Mistral Small specifications
	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
Provider	OpenAI	Mistral AI
Noometry Index	64.4	33.1
Released	2026-07-09	2024-02-26
Weights	Proprietary	Open
Context window	1.05M	256K
Max output	128K	256K
Input $ / M tokens	$4	$0.15
Output $ / M tokens	$20	$0.60
Results tracked	64	39

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Category by category

Coding GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 61.1 (#7), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)

Coding benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
SciCode	57.1%	26.5%
LMArena Coding	1493	1363
ALE-Bench	2,177	497.62
DeepSWE	72.7%	—
FrontierCode	47.5%	—
CursorBench	41.7%	—
LMArena WebDev	1619	—
FrontierSWE	32.2%	—
WeirdML	89.4%	—
BigCodeBench Instruct	—	36.1%
LiveBench Coding	—	36.2%
MirrorCode	20%	—
BigCodeBench Complete	—	46.6%

Agentic & Tool Use GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 50.2 (#7), Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
APEX-Agents	51.4%	—
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard	—	37.1%
OSWorld 2.0	27.3%	—
τ²-bench Banking	46.9%	—
PostTrainBench	36.2%	—
BALROG	60%	—
GBAEval	52.6%	—
GDP.pdf	30.7%	—
LMArena Search	1257	—
Vending-Bench 2	9,619	—

Reasoning GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 74.7 (#6), Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)

Reasoning benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
Kagi LLM Benchmark	67%	37.8%
CritPt	32.3%	0%
LMArena Hard Prompts	1481	1336
DTBench	96%	70.9%
LMCA	59.2%	20.6%
ARC-AGI-2	92.5%	—
SimpleBench	71.7%	—
NYT Connections (extended)	93.8%	—
ARC-AGI-1	97.5%	—
Chess Puzzles	64%	—
EnigmaEval	37.1%	—
EBR-Bench	44.8%	—
LiveBench Reasoning	—	44.8%
Mystery Game Puzzles	58%	—
LiveBench Data Analysis	—	53.7%
Surface Evolver Bench	93.1%	—
Bench to the Future 3	0.14	—
Epoch Capabilities Index	161.99	—
LiveBench	—	44%

Math GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 85.5 (#7), Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)

Math benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025	100%	5.8%
LMArena Math	1472	1341
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)	89.1%	—
FrontierMath Tier 4	82.9%	—
ProofBench	83%	—
LiveBench Math	—	39.9%
MATH Level 5	—	46.8%
FrontierMath Erdős	0%	—

Knowledge GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 64.3 (#16), Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)

Knowledge benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
GPQA Diamond	93.5%	47.5%
Vectara Hallucination Rate	12.4%	5.1%
LMArena Expert	1517	1293
SimpleQA Verified	69.7%	—
MMLU	—	68.7%

Multimodal GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 48.9 (#8), Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)

Multimodal benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
LMArena Vision	1281	1142
Blueprint-Bench 2	33.6%	—
Furniture Assembly	56.7%	—
LMArena Document	1483	—

Multilingual GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 55.4 (#32), Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)

Multilingual benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
LMArena Non-English	1450	1315
LMArena Chinese	1523	1342
LMArena French	1475	1337
LMArena German	1476	1341
LMArena Japanese	1475	1275
LMArena Korean	1434	1260
LMArena Russian	1466	1324
LMArena Spanish	1449	1346

Instruction Following GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 77.8 (#16), Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)

Instruction Following benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
LMArena Instruction Following	1480	1310
LiveBench Instruction Following	—	63.7%

Long Context GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 45.3 (#42), Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)

Long Context benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
LMArena Longer Query	1479	1327

Writing & Preference GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 73.5 (#12), Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
Benchmark	GPT-5.6 Sol	Mistral Small
LMArena Text	1456	1338
LMArena Creative Writing	1450	1304
LMArena Multi-Turn	1456	1344
EQ-Bench Creative Writing	1972	—
EQ-Bench 4	1250	—
LiveBench Language	—	30.5%

Frequently asked questions

Is GPT-5.6 Sol better than Mistral Small?

Which is cheaper, GPT-5.6 Sol or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4 and $20.

Is GPT-5.6 Sol or Mistral Small better for coding?

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on coding benchmarks: 61.1 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

GPT-5.6 Sol does, with 1.05M tokens against 256K.

How many benchmarks do GPT-5.6 Sol and Mistral Small share?

27 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-5.6 Sol has 64 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.