Which is cheaper, Mistral Small or Qwen 2.5 Max?

Mistral Small is cheaper for both input ($0.10/M tokens) and output ($0.30/M tokens), compared to Qwen 2.5 Max at $0.16/$0.64 per million tokens.

Which is faster, Mistral Small or Qwen 2.5 Max?

Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec with a TTFT of 160ms, compared to Qwen 2.5 Max at 80 tokens/sec and 240ms TTFT.

Which has a bigger context window, Mistral Small or Qwen 2.5 Max?

Mistral Small has a 128K token context window, which is equal to Qwen 2.5 Max's 128K context window.

Which is better for coding, Mistral Small or Qwen 2.5 Max?

Qwen 2.5 Max has a higher coding ELO of 1250 compared to Mistral Small's 1160, making it the stronger choice for code generation and programming tasks.

Mistral Small vs Qwen 2.5 Max: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Name: Mistral Small vs Qwen 2.5 Max — 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

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.16/$0.64. Qwen 2.5 Max is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1250 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Qwen 2.5 Max ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1260 vs 1185.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Mistral Small	Qwen 2.5 Max
Provider	Mistral	Alibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens	$0.150	$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens	$0.600	$0.640
Context Window	128K	128K
Max Output Tokens	8,192	8,192
Arena ELO	1,185	1,260
Coding ELO	1,160	1,250
TTFT (ms)	160	240
Tokens/sec	120	80
Multimodal	No	No
JSON Mode	Yes	Yes
Function Calling	Yes	Yes
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. 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

When to Use Qwen 2.5 Max

Choose Qwen 2.5 Max when you need: extremely competitive pricing, strong coding and general capabilities, open-source model available, good multilingual support including chinese. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks.

Strengths:

Extremely competitive pricing
Strong coding and general capabilities
Open-source model available
Good multilingual support including Chinese

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

Mistral Small vs Qwen 2.5 Max: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Side-by-Side Comparison

Frequently Asked Questions

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