Compare / Qwen3.5-0.8B vs Mistral Small 3

Qwen3.5-0.8B vs Mistral Small 3

Which is cheaper, which is more capable, and which does better at each kind of work, from 9 results on 2 sources that measured both models.

Results as of 8 October 2026 (catalogue release 2026-10-08-4199ce0620fe).

Qwen3.5-0.8B
Alibaba · profile
Mistral Small 3
Mistral AI · profile
Results compared
9
Shared sources
2

Qwen3.5-0.8B or Mistral Small 3? The short answer

They score and cost about the same: pick on the results below that match your work.

  • They score about the same on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (6.1 and 6.7).
  • Qwen3.5-0.8B is newer: released 2 Mar 2026, against 30 Jan 2025 for Mistral Small 3.
  • On third-party benchmarks, on the results both models have: Mistral Small 3 does better for reasoning and knowledge and writing.

At a glance

Qwen3.5-0.8BMistral Small 3
Price per million tokensNot on sale$0.050 in · $0.080 out
Blended (3 in : 1 out)–$0.058
Cheapest host, blended––
Intelligence Index6.16.7
Spring Prompt overall––
Output speed, tokens a second––
Context window–32,768 tokens
Released2 Mar 2026 (newer)30 Jan 2025
WeightsClosedOpen
Developer based inChinaFrance

Prices are the developer's list price where we have read it, otherwise the typical host on OpenRouter; see every model's price. Intelligence and speed from Artificial Analysis.

Which is better for what

Each model's rank among models available today, for each kind of work, from our own benchmarks and licensed sources. The better rank is in green.

Use caseQwen3.5-0.8BMistral Small 3
Agents and tool useMulti-step tasks with tools: support desks, coding agents, function calls 163 of 165 not measured
Reasoning and knowledgeHard questions across science, maths and general knowledge 184 of 199 193 of 198
WritingWhat people prefer in blind comparisons, and judged writing quality 180 of 189 156 of 188
Sticking to the factsSummarising without inventing things, and factual answers not measured 9 of 152

Every shared result

Each model's best result on every measure both have, grouped by benchmark, with the setting that produced it. The headline measures of each benchmark come first; the rest are under "Show all". Green marks the better value; where a source reports ranges that overlap, neither is marked.

MeasureQwen3.5-0.8BMistral Small 3
Artificial Analysis reported by Artificial Analysis · 3 results
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Indexindex score, higher is better 6.1thinking reasoning 6.7
GPQA Diamond% of questions, higher is better 23.6%no reasoning 46.2%
Humanity's Last Exam% of questions, higher is better 5.1%no reasoning 3.8%
UGI Leaderboard reported by UGI Leaderboard · 3 results
Writing score · UGIscore out of 100, higher is better 23.0no reasoning 33.9
Requested-length error · UGI% off the requested word count, lower is better 24.0%no reasoning 8.0%
Style adherence · UGIscore from 0 to 1, higher is better 0.32no reasoning 0.35
Show all 9 results (3 more)
MeasureQwen3.5-0.8BMistral Small 3
Artificial Analysis reported by Artificial Analysis · 3 results
IFBench% of instructions, higher is better 21.6%no reasoning 26.4%
Long-context reasoning (AA-LCR)% of questions, higher is better 9.0%thinking reasoning 0.0%
τ²-bench telecom% of tasks, higher is better 65.2%no reasoning 19.6%

Quick answers

Is Qwen3.5-0.8B better than Mistral Small 3?

They score and cost about the same: pick on the results below that match your work.

Run Qwen3.5-0.8B and Mistral Small 3 on your own prompt

Benchmarks aren't your data. Try both side by side in the playground, with the cost of every answer.