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

Verdict

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.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureMistral SmallQwen 2.5 Max
ProviderMistralAlibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$0.640
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,1928,192
Arena ELO1,1851,260
Coding ELO1,1601,250
TTFT (ms)160240
Tokens/sec12080
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
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. 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

Frequently Asked Questions

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