Mistral Small 3 vs Pixtral 12B

Performance benchmarks + pricing comparison — updated April 2026

Mistral Small 3

Mistral

Mistral's cost-effective model. Very affordable for general-purpose tasks.

Input	$0.100/M
Output	$0.300/M
Context	32K tokens
Best For	High-volume tasks, cost optimization
Benchmark	42/100

Mistral

Mistral's lightweight vision-language model. Affordable image understanding with good performance.

Input	$0.150/M
Output	$0.150/M
Context	32K tokens
Best For	Image understanding, visual QA, cost-efficient multimodal apps

Estimated cost per project with 30% cache hit rate. Actual costs may vary based on usage patterns.

Scenario	Mistral Small 3	Pixtral 12B	Savings
Small Script (1K lines)	$0.01	<$0.01	Pixtral 12B saves <$0.01 (22%)
Medium Feature (10K lines)	$0.10	$0.08	Pixtral 12B saves $0.01 (13%)
Large Project (50K lines)	$0.47	$0.41	Pixtral 12B saves $0.06 (13%)
Code Review (5K lines)	$0.02	$0.03	Mistral Small 3 saves <$0.01 (17%)

Mistral Small 3 wins on both price and performance — $0.100/M input with a benchmark score of N/A/100.

For most developers, this is the clear choice between these two models.

Anthropic's balanced model for coding and general tasks. Best price-performance ratio in the Claude family.

Anthropic's most powerful model. Best for complex reasoning and challenging coding tasks.

Previous generation Sonnet. Still excellent for coding tasks at the same price point.

Fast, cost-effective model for high-volume tasks. Great for code review and simple queries.

First generation Opus. Highest reasoning capability in the Claude 3 family.

First generation Sonnet. Balanced performance for general tasks.