Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) vs Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning)
Which is better for the money: Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) by Mistral or Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)
Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) vs Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning): 0.9% less intelligence, 673.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 198.0% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) | Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 11.3 | 11.2 | −0.9% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 0.9% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $42.50 | $328.86 | +673.8% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 7.7× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 14.50s | 43.21s | +198.0% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 198.0% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.15 / $0.60 | $0.14 / $0.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image, Video |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Medium) scores 29.90 for $31.2.
- Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)Qwen3.5 9B (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-4/qwen3-5-9b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mistral-small-4/qwen3-5-9b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill