LLMversus

Mistral Small vs Phi-3 Medium: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Sep 14, 2026By LLMversusUpdated September 17, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare Mistral Small and Phi-3 Medium across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureMistral SmallPhi-3 Medium
ProviderMistralMicrosoft
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$0.170
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$0.170
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
4,096
Arena ELO
1,185
1,170
Coding ELO
1,160
1,175
TTFT (ms)
160
150
Tokens/sec
120
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use Mistral Small

Mistral Small 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
When to Use Phi-3 Medium

Phi-3 Medium excels at cost-effective, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Affordable
  • Fast
  • Good instruction following

Best for:

cost-effectivegeneral-purpose

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