Mistral Large 3 vs Mistral Small 4
Mistral vs Mistral · Prices checked 12 August 2026
There is a 5.0× price gap here. Mistral Small 4 blends to $0.160 per million tokens; Mistral Large 3 to $0.800. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.013 on Mistral Small 4 against $0.065 on Mistral Large 3.
Capability favours Mistral Large 3, ahead on 3 of 3 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Mistral Large 3 leads by 108 points. Mistral Large 3 reads more in one request: 256,000 tokens of context against 128,000.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | Mistral Large 3 | Mistral Small 4 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.500 | $0.100 | 5.0× |
| Output / 1M tokens | $1.50 | $0.300 | 5.0× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $0.800 | $0.160 | 5.0× |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $1.00 | $0.200 | 5.0× |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $0.700 | $0.140 | 5.0× |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $1.30 | $0.260 | 5.0× |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $0.065 | $0.013 | 5.0× |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $0.650 | $0.130 | 5.0× |
| Context window | 256,000 | 128,000 | 2.0× |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Mistral Large 3 | Mistral Small 4 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 84% | 71% | Mistral Large 3 |
| HumanEval | 92% | 68% | Mistral Large 3 |
| LMArena Elo | 1283 Elo | 1175 Elo | Mistral Large 3 |
Only suites both models report are listed, so a missing score is never shown as a loss. Figures are provider-published or from public leaderboards and are not independently re-run. Where a model has no score of its own it inherits its base model’s, since the weights are the same.
What each model is for
Mistral Large 3
Mistral · Frontier
Mistral's frontier model. Strong multilingual performance and Europe-friendly hosting options.
- Multilingual
- EU sovereign hosting
- Strong code
- 128K context
Mistral Small 4
Mistral · Efficient
Mistral's 24B small model: open-weights, fast, and strong on instruction following for its size.
- Open weights (Apache 2.0)
- Single-GPU friendly
- 128K context
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Mistral Large 3 or Mistral Small 4?
There is a 5.0× price gap here. Mistral Small 4 blends to $0.160 per million tokens; Mistral Large 3 to $0.800. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.013 on Mistral Small 4 against $0.065 on Mistral Large 3. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which performs better, Mistral Large 3 or Mistral Small 4?
Capability favours Mistral Large 3, ahead on 3 of 3 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Mistral Large 3 leads by 108 points. These are the figures each provider or public leaderboard publishes, not results we re-run, and a benchmark average can hide the specific behaviour your workload depends on.
Which has the larger context window, Mistral Large 3 or Mistral Small 4?
Mistral Large 3 reads more in one request: 256,000 tokens of context against 128,000. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare Mistral Large 3 and Mistral Small 4 on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.