Mistral Small 4 vs Qwen3.6 Plus

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

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Mistral Small 4· Qwen3.6 Plus

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mistral Small 4 only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Qwen3.6 Plus is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 69 to 64. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Qwen3.6 Plus's sharpest advantage is in instruction following, where it averages 94.3 against 82.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 45.3% to 90.4%.

Qwen3.6 Plus is the reasoning model in the pair, while Mistral Small 4 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Qwen3.6 Plus gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 256K for Mistral Small 4.

Operational tradeoffs

PriceFree*Free*
Speed175 t/sN/A
TTFT0.64sN/A
Context256K1M

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.

BenchmarkMistral Small 4Qwen3.6 Plus
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.061.6%
Claw-Eval58.7%
QwenClawBench57.2%
QwenWebBench1502
TAU3-Bench70.7%
VITA-Bench44.3%
DeepPlanning41.5%
Toolathlon39.8%
MCP Atlas48.2%
MCP-Tasks74.1%
WideResearch74.3%
OSWorld-Verified62.5%
Coding
HumanEval84.8%
SWE-bench Verified78.8%
SWE-bench Pro56.6%
SWE Multilingual73.8%
LiveCodeBench v687.1%
NL2Repo37.9%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU86.0%
MMMU-Pro78.8%
RealWorldQA85.4%
OmniDocBench 1.591.2%
Video-MME (with subtitle)87.8%
Video-MME (w/o subtitle)84.2%
MathVision88.0%
We-Math89.0%
DynaMath88.0%
MStar83.3%
SimpleVQA67.3%
ChatCVQA81.5%
MMLongBench-Doc62.0%
CC-OCR83.4%
AI2D_TEST94.4%
CountBench97.6%
RefCOCO (avg)93.5%
ODINW1351.8%
ERQA65.7%
VideoMMMU84.0%
MLVU (M-Avg)86.7%
ScreenSpot Pro68.2%
Reasoning
AI-Needle68.3%
LongBench v262%
KnowledgeQwen3.6 Plus wins
GPQA45.3%90.4%
MMLU-Pro66.3%88.5%
SuperGPQA71.6%
MMLU-Redux94.5%
C-Eval93.3%
HLE28.8%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.6 Plus wins
IFEval82.9%94.3%
IFBench74.2%
Multilingual
MMLU-ProX84.7%
NOVA-6357.9%
INCLUDE85.1%
PolyMath77.4%
VWT2k-lite84.3%
MAXIFE88.2%
Mathematics
AIME2695.3%
HMMT Feb 202596.7%
HMMT Nov 202594.6%
HMMT Feb 202687.8%
MMAnswerBench83.8%
Frequently Asked Questions (3)

Which is better, Mistral Small 4 or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 45.3% and 90.4%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Mistral Small 4 or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 58.9. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Mistral Small 4 or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 94.3 versus 82.9. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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