Gemma 4 31B vs Mistral Small 4

Summary of our 12-test comparison (scores are our 1–5 internal ratings and ranks are from our test pool):

• Strategic analysis: Gemma 5 vs Mistral 4. Gemma ties for 1st (tied with 25 others out of 54) while Mistral ranks 27 of 54. This matters for numerate tradeoffs and ROI-style recommendations.
• Tool calling: Gemma 5 vs Mistral 4. Gemma is tied for 1st (with 16 others); Mistral ranks 18 of 54. Gemma is notably stronger at choosing functions, arguments and sequencing.
• Faithfulness: Gemma 5 vs Mistral 4. Gemma tied for 1st (with 32 others); Mistral sits at rank 34 of 55. Expect fewer source-hallucination risks with Gemma in our tests.
• Classification: Gemma 4 vs Mistral 2. Gemma is tied for 1st (with 29 others); Mistral ranks 51 of 53. This is a large practical difference for routing, moderation or automated tagging pipelines.
• Constrained rewriting: Gemma 4 vs Mistral 3. Gemma ranks 6 of 53; Mistral ranks 31 of 53. Gemma is better at strict-length compression and tight-format rewrites.
• Agentic planning: Gemma 5 vs Mistral 4. Gemma tied for 1st; Mistral ranks 16 of 54. Gemma showed stronger decomposition and failure-recovery in our tests. Ties (no winner): structured output 5/5, creative problem solving 4/4, long context 4/4, safety calibration 2/2, persona consistency 5/5, multilingual 5/5 — both models match on these tasks in our bench. Practical takeaways: Gemma’s wins are concentrated in strategic analysis, tool calling, faithfulness and classification — all high-impact for production AI systems that need reliable function selection, accurate routing, and low hallucination. Mistral does not win any benchmark in our suite and is consistently more expensive per token.

Per the payload, Gemma 4 31B charges $0.13/mTok input and $0.38/mTok output; Mistral Small 4 charges $0.15/mTok input and $0.60/mTok output. Assuming a 50/50 split of input vs output tokens, cost per 1M tokens: Gemma = $255.00, Mistral = $375.00 (Gemma saves $120). For 10M tokens: Gemma $2,550 vs Mistral $3,750 (save $1,200). For 100M tokens: Gemma $25,500 vs Mistral $37,500 (save $12,000). The gap widens when output tokens dominate because Mistral’s output price ($0.60/mTok) is $0.22 higher than Gemma’s ($0.38/mTok). High-volume consumers (10M+/month) and any cost-sensitive production deployments should care — Gemma materially reduces monthly cloud bill under typical usage profiles.

Choose Gemma 4 31B if you need a lower-cost, higher-performing general-purpose AI for production: it wins 6 of 12 benchmarks in our testing (strategic analysis, tool calling, faithfulness, classification, constrained rewriting, agentic planning), has a larger declared max output (131,072 tokens) and supports text+image+video→text. Choose Mistral Small 4 only if you have a vendor constraint or specific integration requirement; it ties Gemma on structured output, creative problem solving, long context, safety calibration, persona consistency and multilingual tasks but does not win any tests and costs more per token ($0.60 output vs $0.38).