Mistral Small
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 30 of 72 language models by recommenders
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.
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.
35 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 27
- criticize it
- 8
- approval share
- 77%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 27 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong for its price and size
“now Mistral has just released one of the best generalist FOSS models in its price/size range at an excellent price”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Mistral Small 4” “Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60”
Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Mistral Medium 3.5” “quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “European AI. A playbook to own it. By Mistral” - Comment from 17 Dec 2025 in “Mistral Small Creative”
- Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Mistral Medium 3.5”
Good for simple, well-defined tasks
“for simple tasks with pre-defined scope (such as categorization, summarization, etc.) they are the option I choose”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Mistral 3 family of models released” “good enough for most well-defined cases”
Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Mistral AI Acquires Emmi AI to Create the Leading AI Stack” Fast enough to run locally
“The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Mistral raises €3B” “loads relatively fast and is fine for simple prompts”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?” Runs well on consumer GPUs
“When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti... that has been a real jaw dropper”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive” “For LLM I settled with Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506-Q4_K_S.gguf”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Trails newer rival models
“it's pretty obvious they haven't kept up with Qwen (at least with Mistral Small 4)”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Mistral Releases Leanstral” “Mistral large 3/medium 3.5/small 4 have all been pretty dated for a while”
Comment from 30 Oct 2026 in “We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4” “Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Mistral raises €3B” - Comment from 29 May 2026 in “Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit in Paris”
Quality and accuracy often mediocre
“i do know that it can be off about various things”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla” “The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Mistral raises €3B”
Other language models people recommend
The four most recommended other language models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus | 3,331 | 2,746 | 55% | 13 | 4 mo156 owners | — |
| OpenAI GPT | 1,205 | 987 | 55% | 13 | 6 mo47 owners | — |
| Claude Sonnet | 854 | 586 | 59% | 13 | 6 mo46 owners | — |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 828 | 223 | 79% | 8 | 1 mo24 owners | Approved |
| Mistral SmallThis page | 27 | 8 | 77% | 11 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 45 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Mistral large 3/medium 3.5/small 4 have all been pretty dated for a while”
“There mistral-small and original MistralLarge models were awesome”
“Mistral Small 3 24B is probably substantially better than their Qwen 3 0.6B trained model”
“Gemma 4 26B A4B beats it although creative writing is the only category in our benchmark”
“The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed”
“very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b, Mistral Small 3.2”
“very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b”
“boring models (Ministral 3, Mistral Small 4, Small 3, Small 3.1)”
“Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B”
“When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti... that has been a real jaw dropper”
“which to me is equally as impressive as qwen3.5”
“The Mistral Small 24B is also decent.”
“no, MISTRAL 3.2 24B, I don't stream on Twitch.”
“the quantization of the Mistral model worked far better than trying to quantize the Qwen family”
“they've fallen into irrelevancy right now”
“good enough for most well-defined cases”
“I've found tons of use cases for mistral small as well”
“Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60”
“Mistral Small 4 performed well for it's price”
“for the first time it's competitive”
“quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size”
“loads relatively fast and is fine for simple prompts”
“now Mistral has just released one of the best generalist FOSS models in its price/size range at an excellent price”
“It's ok, it's not the best.”
“Seems like it does quite well on that particular benchmark?”
“Mistral has been fairly decent so worth taking a look”
“it's pretty obvious they haven't kept up with Qwen (at least with Mistral Small 4)”
“if someone is using Mistral small via the chat app, it's probably just a waste of time”
“it works well for my use case”
“For LLM I settled with Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506-Q4_K_S.gguf”
“the other two are pretty good at this type of stuff”
“This seems promising, I plan to try it in production.”
“I have extensively. Here's an example of Mistral Small Creative reading weather and snow data creating a ski report”
“they way outperform other models in their cost tier”
“The Small 24B seems to have a decent edge on 30BA3B, though it'll be comparatively extremely slow to run.”
“for simple tasks with pre-defined scope (such as categorization, summarization, etc.) they are the option I choose”
“The small dense model seems particularly good for their small sizes”
“Text encoder is Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506 (which is multimodal)”
“i do know that it can be off about various things”
“Claude Haiku 3.5 and Mistral Small 3 gave the correct answer.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.