Llama 4 Scout vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Scout is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1230 vs 1160. Llama 4 Scout ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1250 vs 1185. Llama 4 Scout offers a larger 10486K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureLlama 4 ScoutMistral Small
ProviderMetaMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.080$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.300$0.600
Context Window10.48576M128K
Max Output Tokens32,7688,192
Arena ELO1,2501,185
Coding ELO1,2301,160
TTFT (ms)200160
Tokens/sec110120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Llama 4 Scout

Choose Llama 4 Scout when you need: 10m token context window, very affordable, open-source and self-hostable, good general performance. It excels at long-context, chatbots, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. Its 10486K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 10M token context window
  • Very affordable
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Good general performance

Best for:

long-contextchatbotscost-sensitiveopen-source
When to Use Mistral Small

Choose Mistral Small when you need: very affordable pricing, fast inference speed, good multilingual support, suitable for lightweight tasks. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast inference speed
  • Good multilingual support
  • Suitable for lightweight tasks

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons