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Mistral Small
◆ OPEN
by Mistral
OPEN WEIGHTSLOCALSMALLCODING HELPWRITING HELP
RANKED #37 OF 270 ASSISTANTS · OVERALL #58 OF 6,567 · VIBE SCORE 6.7 · 981 VOICES
A compact AI model designed for affordable writing and coding assistance.
HAPPY9.3
95 mentions
SAD5.7
42 mentions
VIBE TRAJECTORY
26 weeks · 794 voices
HONEYMOON FADING
Early praise is cooling off in recent weeks.
HOW TO USE IT
Open weights. You can use a hosted service, or download it and run it yourself, free.
RUN IT ON YOUR OWN MACHINE
Open weights: download Mistral Small once and it's yours. No subscription, no rate limits, works offline.
24B parameters, a Q4 file is about 14 GB
- BARE MINIMUM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (16GB)
16 GB VRAM
~$420 NEWQ4_K_M, ~15 tok/s, 8k context
- SWEET SPOT
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB)
24 GB VRAM
~$700 USEDQ5_K_M or Q8_0, ~35 tok/s, 32k context
- FULL POWER
Apple Mac Studio M2 Ultra (128GB)
128 GB UNIFIED MEMORY
~$3,200 USEDFP16 or Q8_0, ~25 tok/s, full 128k context
LEARN HOW TO SET IT UP
WILL MY BOX RUN MISTRAL SMALL?
The three cards above are researched picks. Search the machine you actually have — we only say yes if it should reply at a usable speed, not just load the weights and crawl.
HARDWARE PICKS & PRICES ARE RESEARCHED FROM THE LIVE WEB AND REFRESHED AUTOMATICALLY. TREAT THEM AS BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT CAN YOU ACTUALLY DO WITH IT?
Everyday jobs on each of those rigs: how long Mistral Small takes, and how good the crowd says it is at that kind of work.
| THE JOB | BARE MINIMUMNVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) | SWEET SPOTNVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB) | FULL POWERApple Mac Studio M2 Ultra (128GB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write an emaila paragraph or two, drafted from a one-line brief | ~33 S★★★★★ | ~14 S★★★★★ | ~20 S★★★★★ |
| Summarize a documenta long report boiled down to the points that matter | ~1.7 MIN★★★★★ | ~43 S★★★★★ | ~60 S★★★★★ |
| Build a websitea small landing page, markup and styles together | ~8.9 MIN★★★★★ | ~3.8 MIN★★★★★ | ~5.3 MIN★★★★★ |
| Build a backendan API with routes, storage and tests | ~28 MIN★★★★★ | ~12 MIN★★★★★ | ~17 MIN★★★★★ |
| Build a gamea playable browser game in one file | ~17 MIN★★★★★ | ~7.1 MIN★★★★★ | ~10 MIN★★★★★ |
STARS ARE THE COMMUNITY SCORE FOR THAT KIND OF WORK, DOCKED FOR HOW SQUASHED THE WEIGHTS GET AT EACH TIER. TIMES ARE COMPUTED FROM RESEARCHED SPEEDS. BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT THE INTERNET SAYS
Users love Mistral Small for its incredible value and coding help, noting it can outperform much pricier models. However, it can sometimes make things up.
400 POSTS · 581 COMMENTS · REDDIT · HACKER NEWS · BLUESKY · STACK OVERFLOW · OTHER FORUMS · GITHUB · LEMMY · X · DEV.TO
PEOPLE LOVE
- People feel it is worth the money (3 mentions)
- Good at writing and wording things (2 mentions)
- Popular for coding help (3 mentions)
PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT
- Sometimes makes things up (3 mentions)
TOPIC BY TOPIC
- PricePEOPLE LOVE THIS
3 thumbs up · 0 thumbs down
- Getting facts rightA SORE SPOT
0 thumbs up · 3 thumbs down
- WritingMOSTLY POSITIVE
2 thumbs up · 1 thumbs down
- Help with codePEOPLE LOVE THIS
3 thumbs up · 0 thumbs down
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
- FROM LEMMY >
“Mistral Small Creative beats Claude Opus 4.5 at explaining transformers — 50x cheaper, higher scores.”
LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE?
Checked picks first: tags say why you would switch, stars say how fully each one stands in for Mistral Small.
Llama 4 Maverick
Grok 4.6
Qwen3.8 27B> SOURCES (12)
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2008-10-07 · 19137 UPVOTESHow to modify existing, unpushed commit messages?
How to modify existing, unpushed commit messages?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2014-11-10 · 9413 UPVOTESHow do I merge two dictionaries in a single expression in Python?
How do I merge two dictionaries in a single expression in Python?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2011-07-05 · 9347 UPVOTESWhat are metaclasses in Python?
What are metaclasses in Python?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2008-11-07 · 7306 UPVOTESHow do I create a directory, and any missing parent directories?
How do I create a directory, and any missing parent directories?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2013-02-21 · 7153 UPVOTES"Thinking in AngularJS" if I have a jQuery background?
"Thinking in AngularJS" if I have a jQuery background?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-01-06 · 6159 UPVOTESWhat is the maximum length of a URL in different browsers?
What is the maximum length of a URL in different browsers?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2013-01-19 · 4210 UPVOTESHow can I pair socks from a pile efficiently?
How can I pair socks from a pile efficiently?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-11-14 · 3623 UPVOTESRegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-11-04 · 3535 UPVOTESWhat's a quick way to comment/uncomment lines in Vim?
What's a quick way to comment/uncomment lines in Vim?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-06-23 · 2811 UPVOTESPull latest changes for all git submodules
Pull latest changes for all git submodules
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-09-15 · 2353 UPVOTESHow do you merge two Git repositories?
How do you merge two Git repositories?
- STACK OVERFLOW · 2009-01-28 · 2279 UPVOTESVertically align text next to an image?
Vertically align text next to an image?