Mistral Small 3.1 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Mistral Small 3.1 by Mistral or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

MistralMistral Small 3.1Off the frontier

Intelligence: 7.10
Total cost: $27.8

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… scores 1.8 points higher (8.9 vs 7.1) but costs 2.3× as much to run the benchmark ($63.7 vs $27.8; mid-range vs budget cost classes). Pick NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Mistral Small 3.1.

Metric	Mistral Small 3.1	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	7.1	8.9	+25.4% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 25.4% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$27.82	$63.74	+129.1% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 2.3× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	11.31s	10.10s	−10.7% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 10.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.08 / $0.14	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs Mistral Small 3.1: 25.4% more intelligence, 129.1% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 10.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Mistral Small 3.1: what beats it NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Mistral Small 3.1 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.

Mistral Small 3.1NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/mistral-small-3-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mistral-small-3-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill