Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Phi-4?

Phi-4 is cheaper for both input ($0.07/M tokens) and output ($0.14/M tokens), compared to Mistral Small at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Mistral Small or Phi-4?

Phi-4 is faster at 160 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 100ms, compared to Mistral Small at 120 tokens/sec and 160ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, Mistral Small or Phi-4?

Mistral Small has a 128K token context window, which is larger Phi-4's 16K context window.

Which is better for coding, Mistral Small or Phi-4?

Mistral Small has a higher coding ELO of 1160 compared to Phi-4's 1130, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

Mistral Small vs Phi-4: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: Mistral Small vs Phi-4 — Pricing, Benchmarks & Speed Comparison 2026
Creator: LLMversus
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Phi-4 is significantly cheaper at $0.07/$0.14 per million tokens vs $0.10/$0.30. Mistral Small is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1160 vs 1130. Phi-4 is faster at 160 tokens/sec vs 120 tokens/sec. Mistral Small ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1185 vs 1150. Mistral Small offers a larger 128K context window vs 16K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Mistral Small	Phi-4
Provider	Mistral	Microsoft
Input Price / 1M tokens	$0.150	$0.065
Output Price / 1M tokens	$0.600	$0.140
Context Window	128K	16.384K
Max Output Tokens	8,192	4,096
Arena ELO	1,185	1,150
Coding ELO	1,160	1,130
TTFT (ms)	160	100
Tokens/sec	120	160
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	No
Vision	No	No

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. Its 128K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

When to Use Phi-4

Choose Phi-4 when you need: ultra-low cost for a capable model, strong math for its size (14b params), very fast inference, can run on consumer hardware. It excels at cost-sensitive, edge-deployment, math, lightweight-tasks tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

Ultra-low cost for a capable model
Strong math for its size (14B params)
Very fast inference
Can run on consumer hardware

Best for:

cost-sensitiveedge-deploymentmathlightweight-tasks

Mistral Small vs Phi-4: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

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