Mistral: Mistral Small 4 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 6.1 | 31.3 |
| Input Price | $0.15/M | $0.17/M |
| Output Price | $0.60/M | $0.25/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 209,715 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 7.7 | 35.4 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 12.2 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 47.3 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-9B costs $0.23 and Mistral Small 4 costs $0.30, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 1.3 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.5-9B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.5-9B leads 31.3 to 6.1.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-9B on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost, video input, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 132 | 145 |
| Code Review | 127 | 139 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 129 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 131 | 145 |
| Unit Test Generation | 122 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 127 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 120 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 118 | 126 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 125 | 140 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 137 |
| ETL Scripting | 123 | 132 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 132 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 135 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 135 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 130 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 124 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 120 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →