Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium 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 Small and Phi-3.5 Medium ship a 128K-token context window.

Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium better for coding?

Both Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium 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?

Both ship with open weights. Mistral Small is licensed under Apache-2.0; Phi-3.5 Medium under MIT.

When were Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium released?

Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18. Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20.

Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium 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 Small and Phi-3.5 Medium ship a 128K-token context window.

Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium better for coding?

Both Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium 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?

Both ship with open weights. Mistral Small is licensed under Apache-2.0; Phi-3.5 Medium under MIT.

When were Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium released?

Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18. Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20.

Mistral Small vs Phi-3.5 Medium

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 Small specs · Phi-3.5 Medium specs

Verdict by category

PriceMistral Small
Mistral Small publishes pricing ($0.60 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium 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.
OpennessTie
Both ship open weights, self-host either one.

On balance Mistral Small edges ahead, winning 1 of 5 categories against Phi-3.5 Medium's 0. Mistral Small publishes pricing ($0.60 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium 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. Both ship open weights, self-host either one.

Both shipped within roughly a month of each other in 2024, so they share the same generation of training data and tooling. Mistral Small is usually picked for cheapest llm and fastest llm workloads, while Phi-3.5 Medium 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

Spec	Mistral Small	Phi-3.5 Medium
Provider	Mistral	Microsoft
Released	Sep 2024	Aug 2024
Modalities	text	text
Context window	128K tokens	128K tokens
Max output	,	,
Input · 1M	$0.20 / 1M tokens	Pricing not published
Output · 1M	$0.60 / 1M tokens	Pricing not published
Knowledge cutoff	,	,
Open weights	Yes (Apache-2.0)	Yes (MIT)
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$1.50 vs ,
Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day$15.00 vs ,
RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day$33.60 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.

Input tokens / dayOutput tokens / dayHorizon

Mistral Small$0.050
Phi-3.5 MediumPricing 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 SmallPhi-3.5 Medium

MMLU,78.9

Pick Mistral Small if

Mistral Small fits when…

Apache-2.0 open-weight
Fast and cheap

Pick Phi-3.5 Medium if

Phi-3.5 Medium fits when…

MIT license
128k context
Strong reasoning at 14B

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 Small vs Mistral Large 2 Phi-3.5 Medium vs Mistral Large 2

Frequently asked

Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium 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 Small and Phi-3.5 Medium ship a 128K-token context window.
Is Mistral Small or Phi-3.5 Medium better for coding?
Both Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium 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?
Both ship with open weights. Mistral Small is licensed under Apache-2.0; Phi-3.5 Medium under MIT.
When were Mistral Small and Phi-3.5 Medium released?
Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18. Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20.

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