OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra vs Mistral: Mistral Small 4
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | openai | mistralai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 93.0 | 6.1 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $0.15/M |
| Output Price | $12.00/M | $0.60/M |
| Context Window | 1,050,000 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 209,715 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 90.7 | 7.7 |
| ai_index_agentic | 78.2 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Mistral Small 4 costs $0.30 and GPT-5.6 Terra costs $5.00, so Mistral Small 4 is about 16.7 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.6 Terra reads up to 1,050,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,575 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Mistral Small 4.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra leads 93.0 to 6.1.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, GPT-5.6 Terra scores higher on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Mistral Small 4 on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization).
GPT-5.6 Terra was released in July 2026 and Mistral Small 4 in March 2026.
Pick GPT-5.6 Terra if you need long documents, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Mistral Small 4 if you need lower cost.
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 | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 171 | 132 |
| Code Review | 168 | 127 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 165 | 129 |
| Bug Fixing | 181 | 131 |
| Unit Test Generation | 155 | 122 |
| Code Documentation | 141 | 127 |
| Regex Writing | 135 | 120 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 145 | 118 |
| Frontend Component Design | 147 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 171 | 125 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 128 |
| ETL Scripting | 155 | 123 |
| JSON Extraction | 138 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 147 | 128 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 147 | 128 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 159 | 130 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 122 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 140 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →