Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small cheaper?

Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.60 / 1M tokens per million output tokens, vs $2.00 / 1M tokens for Mistral Medium.

Which has the larger context window?

Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small ship a 128K-token context window.

Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small better for coding?

Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small are competitive on coding benchmarks. See each model's individual spec page for HumanEval and SWE-bench scores where published. For an opinionated pick, consult our Best LLM for Coding ranking.

When were Mistral Medium and Mistral Small released?

Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18.

Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small cheaper?

Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.60 / 1M tokens per million output tokens, vs $2.00 / 1M tokens for Mistral Medium.

Which has the larger context window?

Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small ship a 128K-token context window.

Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small better for coding?

Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small are competitive on coding benchmarks. See each model's individual spec page for HumanEval and SWE-bench scores where published. For an opinionated pick, consult our Best LLM for Coding ranking.

When were Mistral Medium and Mistral Small released?

Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18.

Mistral Medium vs Mistral Small

A complete head-to-head: pricing, context window, benchmarks, modality coverage, and openness, with a programmatic verdict synthesized from the underlying data.

UpdatedApr 30, 2026

Mistral Medium specs · Mistral Small specs

Verdict by category

PriceMistral Small
Mistral Small is roughly 3.3× cheaper on output tokens ($0.60 vs $2.00 per 1M).
Context windowTie
Both ship a 128K-token context window.
BenchmarksTie
No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores.
ModalitiesTie
Both handle text.
OpennessMistral Small
Mistral Small ships open weights (Apache-2.0); Mistral Medium is API-only.

On balance Mistral Small edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Mistral Medium's 0. Mistral Small is roughly 3.3× cheaper on output tokens ($0.60 vs $2.00 per 1M). Both ship a 128K-token context window.

No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores. Both target the same set of modalities (text), so the deciding factors are price, context, and raw quality. Mistral Small ships open weights (Apache-2.0); Mistral Medium is API-only.

Mistral Medium is the newer of the two, released 3 months after Mistral Small, which usually means a more recent knowledge cutoff and updated safety post-training. Mistral Medium is usually picked for customer support and chatbots workloads, while Mistral Small sees more deployments in cheapest llm and fastest llm. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.

Side-by-side specs

Spec	Mistral Medium	Mistral Small
Provider	Mistral	Mistral
Released	Dec 2024	Sep 2024
Modalities	text	text
Context window	128K tokens	128K tokens
Max output	,	,
Input · 1M	$0.40 / 1M tokens	$0.20 / 1M tokens
Output · 1M	$2.00 / 1M tokens	$0.60 / 1M tokens
Knowledge cutoff	,	,
Open weights	No	Yes (Apache-2.0)
API available	Yes	Yes

Pricing at scale

What you'd actually pay at typical workloads. Numbers come from each model's published per-million-token rates.

Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day$4.20 vs $1.50
Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day$42.00 vs $15.00
RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day$72.00 vs $33.60

Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day: $4.20 vs $1.50 per month, model B comes out ahead. Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day: $42.00 vs $15.00 per month, model B comes out ahead. RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day: $72.00 vs $33.60 per month, model B comes out ahead.

Price calculator

Estimated spend for the listed models at your usage. Numbers are derived from each model's published per-million-token rates.

Input tokens / dayOutput tokens / dayHorizon

Mistral Medium$0.140
Mistral Small$0.050

Benchmarks compared

Only sourced numbers. Where a benchmark is missing for one model we show the available value rather than fabricating the other.

Benchmark scores not yet available. We only publish numbers we can source from official model cards or independent leaderboards, see methodology.

Pick Mistral Medium if

Mistral Medium fits when…

Mid-tier balance
EU-friendly

Pick Mistral Small if

Mistral Small fits when…

Apache-2.0 open-weight
Fast and cheap
Cost-sensitive workloads, 3.3× cheaper than Mistral Medium on output tokens.
Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (Apache-2.0).

Don't want either?

Consider Mistral Large 2

Mistral's flagship API model, strong on code and reasoning, EU-friendly hosting.

See Mistral Large 2 specs Mistral Medium vs Mistral Large 2 Mistral Small vs Mistral Large 2

Frequently asked

Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small cheaper?
Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.60 / 1M tokens per million output tokens, vs $2.00 / 1M tokens for Mistral Medium.
Which has the larger context window?
Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small ship a 128K-token context window.
Is Mistral Medium or Mistral Small better for coding?
Both Mistral Medium and Mistral Small are competitive on coding benchmarks. See each model's individual spec page for HumanEval and SWE-bench scores where published. For an opinionated pick, consult our Best LLM for Coding ranking.
Are either of these models open source?
Mistral Small ships open weights (Apache-2.0). Mistral Medium is API-only.
When were Mistral Medium and Mistral Small released?
Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18.

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