Noometry

Model comparison

Mistral Small vs Qwen3.5-9B

Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.1 vs 33.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Last verified . 6 shared benchmarks.

Mistral Small Mistral AI

33.1

Rank #238 Confirmed

Qwen3.5-9B Alibaba (Qwen)

33.3

Rank #235 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Small scores higher in 1 category and Qwen3.5-9B in 4 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3.5-9B leads 33.5 to 15.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 5.8% for Mistral Small and 61.7% for Qwen3.5-9B.
  • Qwen3.5-9B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.15 / $0.60 for Mistral Small.
  • Qwen3.5-9B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.

Side by side

Mistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
ProviderMistral AIAlibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index33.133.3
Released2024-02-262026-02-23
WeightsOpenOpen
Context window256K262K
Max output256K66K
Input $ / M tokens$0.15$0.10
Output $ / M tokens$0.60$0.15
Results tracked3910

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Category by category

Coding Qwen3.5-9B leads

Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242), Qwen3.5-9B: 35.3 (#213)

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
SciCode26.5%27.5%
BigCodeBench Instruct36.1%—
LiveBench Coding36.2%—
LMArena Coding1363—
BigCodeBench Complete46.6%—
ALE-Bench497.62—

Agentic & Tool Use Mistral Small leads

Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87), Qwen3.5-9B: 14.4 (#143)

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
Terminal-Bench—9.2%
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard37.1%—

Reasoning Qwen3.5-9B leads

Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238), Qwen3.5-9B: 22.5 (#178)

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
CritPt0%0.3%
DTBench70.9%71.2%
LMCA20.6%24.5%
Kagi LLM Benchmark37.8%—
Chess Puzzles—12%
LiveBench Reasoning44.8%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1336—
LiveBench Data Analysis53.7%—
Epoch Capabilities Index—139.45
LiveBench44%—

Math Qwen3.5-9B leads

Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287), Qwen3.5-9B: 33.5 (#174)

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-20255.8%61.7%
MathArena Final-Answer Competitions—48.5%
LiveBench Math39.9%—
LMArena Math1341—
MATH Level 546.8%—

Knowledge Qwen3.5-9B leads

Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214), Qwen3.5-9B: 46.0 (#77)

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
GPQA Diamond47.5%79%
Vectara Hallucination Rate5.1%—
LMArena Expert1293—
MMLU68.7%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91), Qwen3.5-9B: —

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
LMArena Vision1142—

Multilingual Not comparable

Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164), Qwen3.5-9B: —

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
LMArena Non-English1315—
LMArena Chinese1342—
LMArena French1337—
LMArena German1341—
LMArena Japanese1275—
LMArena Korean1260—
LMArena Russian1324—
LMArena Spanish1346—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204), Qwen3.5-9B: —

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
LiveBench Instruction Following63.7%—
LMArena Instruction Following1310—

Long Context Not comparable

Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151), Qwen3.5-9B: —

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
LMArena Longer Query1327—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165), Qwen3.5-9B: —

BenchmarkMistral SmallQwen3.5-9B
LMArena Text1338—
LMArena Creative Writing1304—
LMArena Multi-Turn1344—
LiveBench Language30.5%—

Frequently asked questions

Is Mistral Small better than Qwen3.5-9B?

Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (33.1 vs 33.3), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Qwen3.5-9B?

Qwen3.5-9B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Mistral Small lists at $0.15 and $0.60.

Is Mistral Small or Qwen3.5-9B better for coding?

Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 35.3 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5-9B does, with 262K tokens against 256K.

How many benchmarks do Mistral Small and Qwen3.5-9B share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Small has 39 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5-9B has 10.

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