Mistral Medium vs Qwen2.5-72B
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 · Qwen2.5-72B specs- PriceMistral Medium
Mistral Medium publishes pricing ($2.00 / 1M output tokens) while Qwen2.5-72B does not.
- 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.
- OpennessQwen2.5-72B
Qwen2.5-72B ships open weights (Apache-2.0); Mistral Medium is API-only.
It's a genuine coin-flip between Mistral Medium and Qwen2.5-72B: 1 category wins each, with the rest tied. Mistral Medium publishes pricing ($2.00 / 1M output tokens) while Qwen2.5-72B does not. 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. Qwen2.5-72B ships open weights (Apache-2.0); Mistral Medium is API-only.
Mistral Medium is the newer of the two, released 3 months after Qwen2.5-72B, 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 Qwen2.5-72B sees more deployments in open source llm and commercial use 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 | Qwen2.5-72B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral | Alibaba |
| Released | Dec 2024 | Sep 2024 |
| Modalities | text | text |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 128K tokens |
| Max output | , | , |
| Input · 1M | $0.40 / 1M tokens | Pricing not published |
| Output · 1M | $2.00 / 1M tokens | Pricing not published |
| 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 ,
- 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).
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
- Qwen2.5-72BPricing unavailable
Benchmarks compared
Only sourced numbers. Where a benchmark is missing for one model we show the available value rather than fabricating the other.
- MMLU,86.0
Mistral Medium fits when…
- Mid-tier balance
- EU-friendly
Qwen2.5-72B fits when…
- Mature deployment
- Apache-2.0
- Strong multilingual
- Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (Apache-2.0).
Consider Mistral Large 2
Mistral's flagship API model, strong on code and reasoning, EU-friendly hosting.
Frequently asked
Is Mistral Medium or Qwen2.5-72B 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?
Both Mistral Medium and Qwen2.5-72B ship a 128K-token context window.Is Mistral Medium or Qwen2.5-72B better for coding?
Both Mistral Medium and Qwen2.5-72B 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?
Qwen2.5-72B ships open weights (Apache-2.0). Mistral Medium is API-only.When were Mistral Medium and Qwen2.5-72B released?
Mistral Medium was released by Mistral on 2024-12-18. Qwen2.5-72B was released by Alibaba on 2024-09-19.
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