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Mistral Medium vs o4-mini

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

Updated

Mistral Medium specs · o4-mini specs
Verdict by category
  • PriceMistral Medium

    Mistral Medium is roughly 2.2× cheaper on output tokens ($2.00 vs $4.40 per 1M).

  • Context windowo4-mini

    o4-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 128K, 1.6× the room for long documents and codebases.

  • BenchmarksTie

    No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores.

  • Modalitieso4-mini

    o4-mini supports 2 modalities (text, vision) vs 1 for Mistral Medium.

  • OpennessTie

    Both are closed-weight, API-only.

On balance o4-mini edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Mistral Medium's 1. Mistral Medium is roughly 2.2× cheaper on output tokens ($2.00 vs $4.40 per 1M). o4-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 128K, 1.6× the room for long documents and codebases.

No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores. They differ in modality coverage, Mistral Medium handles text while o4-mini handles text, vision, which can be the deciding factor before you even look at benchmarks. Both are closed-weight, API-only.

o4-mini is the newer of the two, released 4 months after Mistral Medium, 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 o4-mini sees more deployments in reasoning and math. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.

Side-by-side specs

SpecMistral Mediumo4-mini
ProviderMistralOpenAI
ReleasedDec 2024Apr 2025
Modalitiestexttext, vision
Context window128K tokens200K tokens
Max output,,
Input · 1M$0.40 / 1M tokens$1.10 / 1M tokens
Output · 1M$2.00 / 1M tokens$4.40 / 1M tokens
Knowledge cutoff,2024-06
Open weightsNoNo
API availableYesYes

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 $9.90
  • Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day$42.00 vs $99.00
  • RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day$72.00 vs $191

Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day: $4.20 vs $9.90 per month, model A comes out ahead. Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day: $42.00 vs $99.00 per month, model A comes out ahead. RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day: $72.00 vs $191 per month, model A 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.

  • Mistral Medium$0.140
  • o4-mini$0.330

Benchmarks compared

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

Mistral Mediumo4-mini
  • GPQA,81.4
Pick Mistral Medium if

Mistral Medium fits when…

  • Mid-tier balance
  • EU-friendly
  • Cost-sensitive workloads, 2.2× cheaper than o4-mini on output tokens.
Pick o4-mini if

o4-mini fits when…

  • Strong reasoning at mid-tier price
  • Fast for a thinking model
  • Solid tool-use
  • Long-context tasks, handles 200K tokens vs 128K for Mistral Medium.
  • Multimodal needs covering vision.
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 specsMistral Medium vs Mistral Large 2o4-mini vs Mistral Large 2

Frequently asked

  • Is Mistral Medium or o4-mini cheaper?
    Mistral Medium is cheaper at $2.00 / 1M tokens per million output tokens, vs $4.40 / 1M tokens for o4-mini.
  • Which has the larger context window?
    o4-mini accepts 200K tokens vs 128K for Mistral Medium.
  • Is Mistral Medium or o4-mini better for coding?
    Both Mistral Medium and o4-mini 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?
    Neither model ships open weights, both are accessible only via their respective providers' APIs.
  • When were Mistral Medium and o4-mini released?
    Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. o4-mini was released by OpenAI on 2025-04-16.
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