Granite-4.0-1B vs Mistral Small 4

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Granite-4.0-1B· Mistral Small 4

Quick Verdict

Pick Mistral Small 4 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Granite-4.0-1B only becomes the better choice if its workflow or ecosystem matters more than the raw scoreboard.

Mistral Small 4 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 64 to 40. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Mistral Small 4's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 58.9 against 31.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMLU-Pro, 32.9% to 66.3%.

Mistral Small 4 gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 128K for Granite-4.0-1B.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderIBMMistral
PriceFree*Free*
SpeedN/A175 t/s
TTFTN/A0.64s
Context128K256K

Decision framing

BenchLM keeps the benchmark table and the operator tradeoffs on the same page so a better score does not hide a materially slower, pricier, or smaller-context model.

Runtime metrics show N/A when BenchLM does not have a sourced snapshot for that exact model. The scoring rules and freshness policy are documented on the methodology page.

BenchmarkGranite-4.0-1BMistral Small 4
Agentic
Coming soon
Coding
HumanEval73%84.8%
Multimodal & Grounded
Coming soon
Reasoning
BBH59.7%
KnowledgeMistral Small 4 wins
MMLU59.7%
GPQA29.7%45.3%
MMLU-Pro32.9%66.3%
Instruction FollowingMistral Small 4 wins
IFEval78.5%82.9%
Multilingual
MGSM27.5%
Mathematics
Coming soon
Frequently Asked Questions (3)

Which is better, Granite-4.0-1B or Mistral Small 4?

Mistral Small 4 is ahead overall, 64 to 40. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMLU-Pro, where the scores are 32.9% and 66.3%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Granite-4.0-1B or Mistral Small 4?

Mistral Small 4 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 58.9 versus 31.7. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Granite-4.0-1B or Mistral Small 4?

Mistral Small 4 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 78.5. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 31, 2026

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