# Mistral Small

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-small-4/

21 people recommended Mistral Small in Hacker News comments, 5 had mixed feelings and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 12 months, in 19 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a capable model for its size and price, good for simple, well-defined tasks and fast enough to run on home hardware. Critics say newer rival models have overtaken it and its output quality is often mediocre.

Summary written by Claude from 39 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong for its price and size (5 comments in the sample): "now Mistral has just released one of the best generalist FOSS models in its price/size range at an excellent price" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414766)) "Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950521)) "quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754565))
- Good for simple, well-defined tasks (2 comments in the sample): "for simple tasks with pre-defined scope (such as categorization, summarization, etc.) they are the option I choose" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123473)) "good enough for most well-defined cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201789))
- Fast enough to run locally (2 comments in the sample): "The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49609949)) "loads relatively fast and is fine for simple prompts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611758))
- Runs well on consumer GPUs (2 comments in the sample): "When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti… that has been a  real jaw dropper" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599397)) "For LLM I settled with Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506-Q4_K_S.gguf" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742667))

## What people warn about

- Trails newer rival models (4 comments in the sample): "it's pretty obvious they haven't kept up with Qwen (at least with Mistral Small 4" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408818)) "Mistral large 3/medium 3.5/small 4 have all been pretty dated for a while" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50302874)) "Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606808))
- Quality and accuracy often mediocre (1 comment in the sample): "i do know that it can be off about various things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927548))

## Other language models people recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus/): 1880 recommend, 852 mixed, 2013 criticize
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable/): 803 recommend, 359 mixed, 1291 criticize
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5/): 764 recommend, 290 mixed, 764 criticize
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash/): 631 recommend, 127 mixed, 168 criticize

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Mistral Small", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-small-4/ (21 recommend, 5 mixed, 7 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.