As of August 30, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 60% cheaper per million tokens than Magistral Small 2506. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Magistral Small 2506 at $0.50 / $1.50. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://mistral.ai/technology/pricing
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); Mistral AI pricing (https://mistral.ai/technology/pricing)
Grok-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
Magistral Small 2506
Mistral
Input
$0.50
Output
$1.50
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
AIME 2025. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Grok-3 MiniMagistral Small 2506Verdict
Grok-3 Mini offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 30, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 60% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.80 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Magistral Small 2506 costs $0.50 / $1.50 per million tokens ($2.00 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://mistral.ai/technology/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Magistral Small 2506 Mistral API pricing is $0.50 input and $1.50 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok-3 Mini leads on LiveCodeBench: Grok-3 Mini at 80.4% vs Magistral Small 2506 at 51.3%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while Magistral Small 2506 supports 40K tokens. Grok-3 Mini offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Grok-3 Mini leads on 6 of 6 shared benchmarks versus Magistral Small 2506's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Grok-3 Mini and Magistral Small 2506 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Grok-3 Mini has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Grok-3 Mini through xAI and Magistral Small 2506 through Mistral AI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published xAI API pricing and Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://mistral.ai/technology/pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Grok-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Magistral Small 2506 supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok-3 Mini has a measured throughput of approximately 100 tokens/second. Throughput data for Magistral Small 2506 is not yet available. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Grok-3 Mini or Magistral Small 2506 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. Magistral Small 2506 costs $0.50/M input and $1.50/M output via Mistral AI.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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