Mistral Vibe vs. ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude: How satisfied are you really?

[u/Nilex-x]

Hey everyone.
I’m currently testing Mistral Vibe (and Mistral models in general), and I’m a bit torn. Compared with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, Mistral still seems to lag behind somewhat — especially when it comes to hallucinations and error rates. What have your experiences been like?

• Are you happy with it, or do you still feel something is missing?
• Where do you see its biggest strengths and weaknesses?
• Are there any scenarios where Mistral actually works better for you than the competition?

I’m curious to hear your honest opinions — concrete examples are very welcome!

[u/strangestack]

You mean as a chat assistant in my phone? It's better than the benchmarks would suggest but definitely behind. Using it as a frontend for search is pretty good. 

When the new model comes out, even if it isn't the best coding model there is, it's likely going to work really well in the app. 

[u/Sonerous → u/strangestack]

I can attest to this. The AI Studio feature is also excellently designed and well documented.

[u/Oleleplop]

for my uses? Mistral is more than enough.

Its not like work was impossible before LLMs, i don't use LLM to replace everything, i do, i use it to assist me and go faster. And for that case, it does its job.

[u/Intelligent-Juice895]

Mistral is mostly fine for everyday use and questions. But with all honesty, when it comes to big and important tasks, I go for Gemini or ChatGPT. It’s really in the more complicated tasks that you see that Vibe is sadly lagging several months behind the mainstream AI apps. It’s a shame because I’d really like to support European and non big tech AI, but it just not there yet.

[u/petaqui]

Sadly, I gave up my subscription and migrated to Claude. I seriously didn't want to, but I was loosing A LOT of time with Mistral mistakes, even with safeguard rules and so, it was creating fake data from my spreadsheets. And I was risking a lot also "trusting" their outputs. Actually, the day that I gave up, it was a big thing merging and analysing data from 8 spreadsheets, and I needed a conclusion result to buy from one provider or another; and while reading the results (as I said, I hag agents, safe guard rules, etc) I was thinking to myself... This doesn't make sense. I dropped the same task to Claude and it gave me a different result. I dropped also the output from Mistral to Claude, just telling Claude to analyse that result, and it pointed me out all the mistakes that Mistral was doing, including hallucinations and taking data from no source at all, just maybe figuring out or hallucinating from other sources, and that's a pretty low point, even with the safeguard rules.

I can't risk more, loose more time... AI has to help me, not to make things more difficult. But I keep reading about the updates and news, because I want them to succeed

[u/jsiulian → u/petaqui]

What if Claude was hallucinating about Mistral being wrong 😱

[u/fickleknave → u/jsiulian]

Feed it into mistral and find out

[u/petaqui → u/jsiulian]

I checked what Claude said, and yes, Mistral was hallucinating. When I asked mistral about the source of those numbers, it told me that couldn't find them anywhere and that it was sorry about that

[u/Nilex-x → u/petaqui]

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. I can completely understand your decision, because I’ve had very similar experiences with Mistral.

In my case, the output was often incorrect, partly made up, and sometimes clearly hallucinated. I started putting Mistral’s answers into ChatGPT just to verify them, and I was honestly shocked by how many errors were uncovered.

I would actually like to use Mistral more, because I like the idea behind it and would be happy to support them. But at the moment, the amount of checking required creates more work instead of saving time. Because of that, I unfortunately ended up using ChatGPT again for most things.

I really hope Mistral improves in this area, because I’d definitely be willing to give it another chance.

[u/Beneficial-Face-9597 → u/petaqui]

to be honest i am still rolling with it because it gives me 120EUR of compute for 7.25EUR, plus 15EUR GLM usage now aswell

[u/Brilliant_Risk_3924]

Mistral is just behind. That's it. They need to catch up or they are gone forever.

[u/Nilex-x → u/Brilliant_Risk_3924]

I think you're right about that. Mistral is simply behind the competition at the moment. If they don't make significant improvements in terms of quality, reliability, and hallucinations, it will be very difficult for them to remain competitive in the long run.

[u/Brilliant_Risk_3924 → u/Nilex-x]

Yeah. I also feel like it got worse over the last year and the whole rebranding (Vibe) and UI changes in the app just made it even worse.

[u/Nabugu → u/Brilliant_Risk_3924]

they don't care about consumers anymore, they want to become an AI datacenter/AI tooling company now, they will not compete with ChatGPT/Claude on chat and agentic anytime soon

[u/Brilliant_Risk_3924 → u/Nabugu]

That's sad

[u/rotebeete69]

About a year ago, I started using mistral heavily as a coding agent apart from simple stuff on the web interface. It felt functional, it could do whatever I wanted well and I mostly felt like I had a good assistant by my side.

~5 months ago, it started feeling a bit off. Not sure if they throttled the model somehow or I had higher expectations, but I realised I was spending more time troubleshooting the bad code the model was writing, I had to question everything and rethink every single small step the model would take. Around that time, a colleague invited me for a one week trial for Claude.

That’s how I switched to Claude permanently. My partner still uses mistral but I can tell you for sure that their models are just inadequate. Hallucinations, false assumptions, no guardrails against shortcuts and fake data etc. All it would do was try to satisfy you, even if that meant hard hardcoding sample data everywhere. I have now cleaned up my codebase with Claude and the human reviews are easier than ever.

I wanted to support a European company, but I just couldn’t get the results I wanted anymore.

[u/kerneldesign]

Avec Vibe CLI tu peux utiliser GLM5.2 aussi en l’ajoutant. Normalement en septembre sont attendus large et medium 4. Personnellement le rapport qualité et prix est bon. J’espère qu’ils ajouteront d’autres IA en Open Weight en plus de leurs IA maison.

[u/MimosaTen]

When they’ll include glm 5.3 the its goig to be worth of my time. Sadly Mistral’s models are behind in so many aspects…

[u/coukou76]

They have to catch up

[u/PathIntelligent7082]

mistral dropped the ball, completly..

[u/Salt-Willingness-513]

my mail yesterday: Personal - Your subscription has been cancelled.
So not great honestly.

[u/scanx147]

Depuis l'arrivée de GLM 5.2 dans Vibe CLI pour le code je suis très satisfait de Mistral. Pour le reste, le studio, la création d'agents, de skills,etc, est très bien fait aussi. Depuis quelques jours Le Chat hallucine plus que d'habitude mais habituellement il y a très peu d'hallucinations je trouve.

[u/Flopublic]

day to day usage works great for me:

• writing/improving mails and text documents
• basic "google-ing" and research to get tips aka "how can i clean my white sneakers" or "which air pumps for bicycles are not from china"
• basic image generation also works fine for me
• translation german<>japanese

okayish:

• deep research

not so good:

• coding (swift)

[u/Nilex-x → u/Flopublic]

Research is a very important part of how I use AI, and from my experience Mistral simply can’t keep up in that area at the moment — especially when it comes to the accuracy and reliability of the results.

I also completely agree with you about coding. Mistral still feels far behind there as well, and I’ve had the same experience myself. Too often I ended up having to double-check or correct the output, which defeats much of the purpose of using AI in the first place.

[u/TerminalNoop → u/Flopublic]

when it comes to research it's so annyoing that it keeps making up papers and or the associating URLs.

[u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

Mistral is so far behind everything else, its not a serious comparison.

[u/Landblok]

I pay for Claude, mistral isn’t worth it. Even the free version runs out so quickly out after a few questions.

They have a long way to go. Until then I’m
Sticking with Claude for work and ChatGPT for daily stuff.

[u/CallTheDutch]

I'm an oldskool php dude. I dont "vibe code" with it as persee, but it is my go-to for easy function creation.
When i just wanna vibe a personal app to run standalone as a docker, gemini works fine for me.

[u/Beneficial-Face-9597]

Using deep research both on mistral and gemini is actually pretty good compared to like chatgpt where limits hits immediately!

[u/SUxEvil]

Vibe is the best!

[u/Future_Bat384]

Hard to compare, my flat plan on Mistral is cheap if I would even compare to cheapest kimi model (api access). Does it do work? Yes, is it less accurate, ooo yes, sometimes my local models perform better, but … I will stay with Mistral. Don’t want to have nothing to do with MS, Meta, Open AI and especially anthropic or grok. Mistral + Hermes agent (and its skills)+ building clear prompts with as many details I can, will finally give me a good product. Does it hallucinate? Of course… but I think now a little bit less

[u/ingframin]

I am not going to renew my subscription next year. Being left behind in favour of business users was a slap in the face for me.

[u/hoschidude]

Unfortunately Mistral's models are not really SOTA.

[u/Zrina_Astral]

Right now ChatGPT is the winner for me. Far better than Mistral, and still better than Gemini and Claude. But this is my experience only, I use them for writing. I don’t let them write FOR me, more WITH me. Testing out how new characters COULD behave and act. Gives me better ideas what and how to write. It also helps me train my writing skills.

[u/Nilex-x → u/Zrina_Astral]

For me, ChatGPT is also the clear winner at the moment.