The closest alternative to Mistral Small 3.1 24B is Mistral Medium 3.5 — comparable intelligence (29.9 vs —); for a cheaper option, GPT-5.6 Luna runs $0.100/M vs $0.351/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Mistral Medium 3.5 is the closest alternative to Mistral Small 3.1 24B, with an Intelligence Index of 29.9 (Mistral Small 3.1 24B scores —) at $1.50 per million input tokens.
Yes — GPT-5.6 Luna costs $0.100 per million input tokens versus $0.351 for Mistral Small 3.1 24B, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Mistral Small 3.1 24B — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.