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

Verdict

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.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureMistral SmallPhi-4
ProviderMistralMicrosoft
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$0.065
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$0.140
Context Window128K16.384K
Max Output Tokens8,1924,096
Arena ELO1,1851,150
Coding ELO1,1601,130
TTFT (ms)160100
Tokens/sec120160
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionNoNo
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

Frequently Asked Questions

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