Model comparison
Mercury 2.5 vs Mistral Small
Mercury 2.5 and Mistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.5 vs 33.4), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 3 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 3 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2.5 scores higher in 3 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 3 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Mercury 2.5 leads 23.3 to 16.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is SciCode: 38.5% for Mercury 2.5 and 26.5% for Mistral Small.
- Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.15 / $0.60 for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 260K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 33.5 | 33.4 |
| Released | 2026-09-08 | 2024-02-26 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 260K | 262K |
| Max output | 66K | 256K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.04 | $0.15 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.15 | $0.60 |
| Results tracked | 4 | 39 |
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Category by category
Coding Mercury 2.5 leads
Mercury 2.5: 39.5 (#156), Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.5% | 26.5% |
| ALE-Bench | 301.65 | 497.62 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1362 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
Reasoning Mercury 2.5 leads
Mercury 2.5: 22.4 (#193), Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0% | 0% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1335 |
| DTBench | — | 70.9% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |
Math Mercury 2.5 leads
Mercury 2.5: 23.3 (#272), Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 5.8% |
| ProofBench | 3% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |
Knowledge Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1291 |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1340 |
| LMArena French | — | 1337 |
| LMArena German | — | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1346 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1310 |
Long Context Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1327 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2.5 better than Mistral Small?
Mercury 2.5 and Mistral Small score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.5 vs 33.4), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2.5 or Mistral Small?
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Mistral Small lists at $0.15 and $0.60.
Is Mercury 2.5 or Mistral Small better for coding?
Mercury 2.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.5 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 260K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2.5 and Mistral Small share?
3 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2.5 has 4 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.