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Mistral Large vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $2.00/$6.00. Mistral Large is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1240 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 75 tokens/sec. Mistral Large ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1245 vs 1185.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureMistral LargeMistral Small
ProviderMistralMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.500$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.50$0.600
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,1928,192
Arena ELO1,2451,185
Coding ELO1,2401,160
TTFT (ms)280160
Tokens/sec75120
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Mistral Large

Choose Mistral Large when you need: strong multilingual support, good coding capabilities, european ai alternative, open-weight model available. It excels at coding, multilingual, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong multilingual support
  • Good coding capabilities
  • European AI alternative
  • Open-weight model available

Best for:

codingmultilingualgeneral-purpose
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

Frequently Asked Questions

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