GPT-5 mini vs Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)
Compare GPT-5 mini and Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) across pricing, context window, capabilities, benchmarks, and API access to choose the better fit for reasoning-heavy tasks versus cost-efficient scale.
Overview Comparison
Structured side-by-side differences for the highest-signal model metadata.
Provider
The entity that currently provides this model.
Model ID
The routed model identifier exposed by upstream providers.
Input Context Window
The number of tokens supported by the input context window.
Maximum Output Tokens
The number of tokens that can be generated by the model in a single request.
Open Source
Whether the model's code is available for public use.
Release Date
When the model was first released.
Knowledge Cut-off Date
When the model's knowledge was last updated.
API Providers
The providers that currently expose the model through an API.
Modalities
Types of data each model can process or return.
Pricing Comparison
Compare current token pricing before you choose the cheaper or more scalable API option.
Capabilities Comparison
See where each model overlaps, where they differ, and which one supports more of the features you care about.
Benchmark Comparison
Shared benchmark rows make it easier to compare performance where both models have published scores.
| Benchmark | GPT-5 mini | Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) |
|---|---|---|
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AIME 2024
American math olympiad problems
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GPQA Diamond
PhD-level science questions (biology, physics, chemistry)
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HLE
Questions that challenge frontier models across many domains
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LiveCodeBench
Real-world coding tasks from recent competitions
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MATH-500
Undergraduate and competition-level math problems
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MMLU-Pro
Expert knowledge across 14 academic disciplines
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SciCode
Scientific research coding and numerical methods
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What Reddit discussions say about GPT-5 mini vs Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)
GPT-5 mini and Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) are both surfacing live Reddit discussions, giving this comparison a community layer beyond specs and benchmarks.
The most visible threads right now are clustered in r/GithubCopilot, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI.
I asked copilot to check correct answers in a quiz for me
https://preview.redd.it/5b49y505cz5g1.jpg?width=482&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7bfd451451d464fe2dd5ee4d31dc9a6137f39bde
Hi everyone,
We ran task benchmarks on the GPT-5 series models, and as per general consensus, they are likely not a break through in intelligence. But they are a good replacement of o3, o1 and gpt-4.1. And lower latency and the cost improvements are impressive! Likely really good models for chatgpt, even though users have to get used to them.
**For builders, perhaps one way to look at it:**
o3 and gpt-4.1 -> gpt-5
o1 -> gpt-5-mini
o1-mini -> gpt-5-nano
**But let's look at a tricky failure case to be aware of.**
Part of our context oriented task evals, we task the model to read a travel journal and count the number of visited cities:
Question: "How many cities does the author mention"
Expected: 19
GPT-5: 12
Models that consistently gets this right is gemini-2.5-flash, gemini-2.5-pro, claude-sonnet-4, claude-opus-4, claude-sonnet-3.7, claude-3.5-sonnet, gpt-oss-120b, grok-4.
To be a good model for building with, context attention is one of the primary criterias. What makes Anthropic models stand out is how well they have been utilising the context window even since sonnet-3.5. Gemini series and Grok seems to be putting attention to this as well.
You can read more about our task categories and eval methods here: [https://opper.ai/models](https://opper.ai/models)
For those building with it, anyone else seeing similar strengths/weaknesses?
Hi LocalLlama.
Here are the results from the March run of the GACL. A few observations from my side:
* **GPT-5.4** clearly leads among the major models at the moment.
* **Qwen3.5-27B** performed better than every other Qwen model except **397B**, trailing it by only **0.04 points**. In my opinion, it’s an outstanding model.
* **Kimi2.5** is currently the top **open-weight** model, ranking **#6 globally**, while **GLM-5** comes next at **#7 globally**.
* Significant difference between Opus and Sonnet, more than I expected.
* **GPT models dominate the Battleship game.** However, **Tic-Tac-Toe** didn’t work well as a benchmark since nearly all models performed similarly. I’m planning to replace it with another game next month. Suggestions are welcome.
For context, **GACL** is a league where models generate **agent code** to play **seven different games**. Each model produces **two agents**, and each agent competes against every other agent except its paired “friendly” agent from the same model. In other words, the models themselves don’t play the games but they generate the agents that do. Only the top-performing agent from each model is considered when creating the leaderboards.
All **game logs, scoreboards, and generated agent codes** are available on the league page.
[Github Link](https://github.com/summersonnn/Game-Agent-Coding-Benchmark)
[League Link](https://gameagentcodingleague.com/leaderboard.html)
400k context window, cheaper than K2 providers.
The Gemini Flash 2.5 is the second most popular model on Openrouter, and 5-Mini is better in almost every respect.
It follows instructions well, handles long context effectively, and is fast...
Just saying it is a great workhorse.
Which model should you choose?
Use the summary below to decide which model better fits your workflow, budget, and feature requirements.
GPT-5 mini
GPT-5 mini is a stronger fit for reasoning-heavy tasks, tool-augmented workflows, multimodal applications.
Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)
Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) is a stronger fit for cost-efficient scale, benchmark-led evaluation.
Choose GPT-5 mini if you prioritize reasoning-heavy tasks, tool-augmented workflows, multimodal applications. Choose Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) if your workflow depends more on cost-efficient scale, benchmark-led evaluation.
Common questions about GPT-5 mini vs Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)
What is the main difference between GPT-5 mini and Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)?
GPT-5 mini leans toward reasoning-heavy tasks, tool-augmented workflows, multimodal applications, while Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) is better suited to cost-efficient scale, benchmark-led evaluation.
Which model is cheaper: GPT-5 mini or Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)?
Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) starts lower on input pricing at $0.1000 per 1M input tokens, compared with $0.2500 for GPT-5 mini.
Which model has the larger context window: GPT-5 mini or Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03)?
GPT-5 mini is listed with a context window of 400,000, while Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) is listed with 128,000.
How should I evaluate GPT-5 mini vs Mistral Small 3.1 (25.03) for my use case?
This comparison currently includes 7 shared benchmark rows, helping you compare practical performance across overlapping evaluations.