R1 0528 vs Mistral Small 3.2 24B

Summary: R1 0528 outperforms Mistral Small 3.2 24B on 10 benchmarks, with two ties. Detailed walk-through (scores from our tests):

• Tool calling: R1 5 vs Mistral 4 — R1 ties for 1st ("tied for 1st with 16 other models out of 54 tested"). This matters for workflows that select functions, format args, and sequence calls reliably.
• Agentic planning: R1 5 vs Mistral 4 — R1 tied for 1st ("tied for 1st with 14 other models out of 54"). Expect stronger goal decomposition and failure recovery in our tests.
• Long context: R1 5 vs Mistral 4 — R1 tied for 1st ("tied for 1st with 36 other models out of 55"); better retrieval accuracy at 30K+ token ranges in our suite.
• Faithfulness: R1 5 vs Mistral 4 — R1 tied for 1st ("tied for 1st with 32 other models out of 55"); R1 sticks to source material more reliably in our tests.
• Persona consistency: R1 5 vs Mistral 3 — R1 tied for 1st ("tied for 1st with 36 other models out of 53"); R1 resists injection and keeps character better.
• Classification: R1 4 vs Mistral 3 — R1 tied for 1st on score ("tied for 1st with 29 other models out of 53"); better routing and labeling.
• Strategic analysis: R1 4 vs Mistral 2 — R1’s score places it mid-table (rank 27 of 54) but substantially ahead of Mistral (rank 44 of 54); R1 gives stronger nuanced tradeoff reasoning in our tests.
• Creative problem solving: R1 4 vs Mistral 2 — R1 ranks 9 of 54; expect more non-obvious but feasible ideas from R1.
• Safety calibration: R1 4 vs Mistral 1 — R1 ranks 6 of 55 (4 models share this); Mistral ranks 32 of 55. R1 refuses harmful requests and permits legitimate ones more reliably in our testing.
• Multilingual: R1 5 vs Mistral 4 — R1 tied for 1st ("tied for 1st with 34 other models out of 55") so non-English parity is stronger in our runs.
• Structured output and Constrained rewriting: ties (both score 4). Note a practical quirk in R1: the model returns empty responses on structured_output and can require high max-completion tokens because it uses reasoning tokens that consume the output budget on short tasks — factor this into prompt and parameter settings. External math benchmarks (supplementary): R1 scores 96.6 on MATH Level 5 (Epoch AI) — rank 5 of 14 — and 66.4 on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI) — rank 16 of 23. Mistral Small 3.2 24B has no external math scores in the payload. Overall, R1 wins the majority of real-task benchmarks in our 12-test suite and shows particular strength in tool-calling, agentic planning, faithfulness, long-context, and safety.

Per-mTok pricing from the payload: R1 0528 charges $0.50 input and $2.15 output per mTok; Mistral Small 3.2 24B charges $0.075 input and $0.20 output per mTok. That yields per-1M-token (1,000 mTok) costs as follows: R1 input $500 / output $2,150; Mistral input $75 / output $200. If you bill both 1M input + 1M output tokens, R1 = $2,650 vs Mistral = $275. For a 50/50 split (1M total tokens with half input/half output): R1 ≈ $1,325 per 1M tokens vs Mistral ≈ $137.50 per 1M — ~9.6× in that balanced scenario. Scale effects: at 10M total tokens multiply those figures by 10 (R1 ≈ $13,250 vs Mistral ≈ $1,375 for 50/50), and at 100M multiply by 100. The payload also reports a priceRatio of 10.75 (R1 vs Mistral). Bottom line: teams with heavy production usage (10M+ tokens/month) or tight margins should prefer Mistral for cost; teams where the 10+ benchmark wins matter (agentic planning, faithfulness, tool-calling, long-context) should budget for R1 despite the large price gap.

Choose R1 0528 if: you need top-ranked tool calling, agentic planning, long-context retrieval, faithfulness, or safety calibration in our tests and can absorb higher inference costs (R1 output $2.15/mTok; input $0.50/mTok). Choose Mistral Small 3.2 24B if: you need a far cheaper model (output $0.20/mTok; input $0.075/mTok), require text+image->text capability, or are optimizing for cost at scale (10M–100M tokens/month). If you need reasonable structured outputs or constrained rewriting but have strict budget limits, Mistral is the cost-effective pick; if task-critical reliability and agentic behavior matter more than cost, pick R1 0528.