Mercury 2 vs Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Mercury 2 by Inception or Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Clear winner

InceptionMercury 2Off the frontier

Intelligence: 10.80
Total cost: $105

MistralMistral Small 4 (Reasoning)On the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 11.30
Total cost: $42.5

Verdict

Pick Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)

Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) vs Mercury 2: 4.6% more intelligence, 59.5% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 79.5% slower end-to-end.

Metric	Mercury 2	Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	10.8	11.3	+4.6% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 4.6% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$104.94	$42.50	−59.5% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 59.5% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	8.08s	14.50s	+79.5% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 79.5% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.25 / $0.75	$0.15 / $0.60
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Mercury 2: what beats it Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Mercury 2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.
Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Medium) scores 29.90 for $31.2.

Mercury 2Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2/mistral-small-4 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2/mistral-small-4?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill