ModelRefs / o4 Mini vs Mistral Small 3.1
o4 Mini vs Mistral Small 3.1
o4 Mini 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.
o4 Mini: o4 Mini is OpenAI's efficient reasoning model, adding vision support to the mini reasoning tier for agentic tasks needing both image understanding and step-by-step logic at low cost per task. It is now deprecated: OpenAI gives the o4-mini-2025-04-16 snapshot and the o4-mini alias a shutdown date of 23 October 2026, with gpt-5.6-terra as the substitute.
Context window: Mistral Small 3.1 accepts up to 128,000 tokens, o4 Mini up to 200,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Mistral Small 3.1 vs o4 Mini at a glance
| Attribute | Mistral Small 3.1 | o4 Mini |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | $1.1/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.3/M tokens | $4.4/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%, o4 Mini 63%. Mistral Small 3.1 leads on this dimension.
- Reasoning: Mistral Small 3.1 63%, o4 Mini 79%. o4 Mini 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 o4 Mini vs Mistral Small 3.1.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, o4 Mini or Mistral Small 3.1?
o4 Mini and Mistral Small 3.1 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is o4 Mini cheaper than Mistral Small 3.1?
Compare $0.00110 vs $0.00010 on this page.