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Mistral Medium vs Phi-4

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 · Phi-4 specs
Verdict by category
  • PriceMistral Medium

    Mistral Medium publishes pricing ($2.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-4 does not.

  • Context windowMistral Medium

    Mistral Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 16K, 8.0× 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.

  • ModalitiesTie

    Both handle text.

  • OpennessPhi-4

    Phi-4 ships open weights (MIT); Mistral Medium is API-only.

On balance Mistral Medium edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Phi-4's 1. Mistral Medium publishes pricing ($2.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-4 does not. Mistral Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 16K, 8.0× the room for long documents and codebases.

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. Phi-4 ships open weights (MIT); Mistral Medium is API-only.

Both shipped within roughly a month of each other in 2024, so they share the same generation of training data and tooling. Mistral Medium is usually picked for customer support and chatbots workloads, while Phi-4 sees more deployments in on device and edge deployment. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.

Side-by-side specs

SpecMistral MediumPhi-4
ProviderMistralMicrosoft
ReleasedDec 2024Dec 2024
Modalitiestexttext
Context window128K tokens16K tokens
Max output,,
Input · 1M$0.40 / 1M tokensPricing not published
Output · 1M$2.00 / 1M tokensPricing not published
Knowledge cutoff,,
Open weightsNoYes (MIT)
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 ,
  • Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day$42.00 vs ,
  • RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day$72.00 vs ,

Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates).

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
  • Phi-4Pricing unavailable

Benchmarks compared

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

Mistral MediumPhi-4
  • MMLU,84.8
  • HumanEval,82.6
Pick Mistral Medium if

Mistral Medium fits when…

  • Mid-tier balance
  • EU-friendly
  • Long-context tasks, handles 128K tokens vs 16K for Phi-4.
Pick Phi-4 if

Phi-4 fits when…

  • Exceptional quality at 14B parameters
  • MIT license, clean commercial use
  • Strong on math
  • Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (MIT).
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 2Phi-4 vs Mistral Large 2

Frequently asked

  • Is Mistral Medium or Phi-4 cheaper?
    Per-token pricing isn't published for at least one of these models, check each model's spec page for current rates.
  • Which has the larger context window?
    Mistral Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 16K for Phi-4.
  • Is Mistral Medium or Phi-4 better for coding?
    Both Mistral Medium and Phi-4 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?
    Phi-4 ships open weights (MIT). Mistral Medium is API-only.
  • When were Mistral Medium and Phi-4 released?
    Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. Phi-4 was released by Microsoft on 2024-12-12.
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