ModelRefs / o3 vs Mistral Small 3.1
o3 vs Mistral Small 3.1
o3 vs Mistral Small 3.1: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Mistral Small 3.1: Mistral Small 3.1 is Mistral AI's 24-billion-parameter multimodal model, accepting text and image input across a context window of up to 128,000 tokens and published under Apache 2.0. Mistral reports inference speeds of 150 tokens per second and compares it with Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini in the same weight class. Its size and licence make it one of the larger models that remains practical to self-host on a single machine.
o3: o3 is OpenAI's April 2025 reasoning model, applying deliberate chain-of-thought computation at inference time to mathematics, science and competitive programming tasks, and the release that brought OpenAI's scalable test-time compute approach to its production API. OpenAI has since deprecated it, scheduling the o3-2025-04-16 snapshot to shut down on 11 December 2026 with gpt-5.6-sol as the replacement.
Context window: Mistral Small 3.1 accepts up to 128,000 tokens, o3 up to 200,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Mistral Small 3.1 vs o3 at a glance
| Attribute | Mistral Small 3.1 | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | OpenAI |
| Released | 2025-03-17 | 2025-04-16 |
| Context window | 128,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Input price | $0.1/M tokens | $10/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.3/M tokens | $40/M tokens |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | Yes, open weights | No, hosted only |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
Where they differ most
- Cost Efficiency: Mistral Small 3.1 95%, o3 13%. Mistral Small 3.1 leads on this dimension.
- Reasoning: Mistral Small 3.1 63%, o3 86%. o3 leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to o3 vs Mistral Small 3.1.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, o3 or Mistral Small 3.1?
o3 and Mistral Small 3.1 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is o3 cheaper than Mistral Small 3.1?
Compare $0.0100 vs $0.00010 on this page.