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Mistral Small 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 Small specs · Phi-4 specs
Verdict by category
  • PriceMistral Small

    Mistral Small publishes pricing ($0.60 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-4 does not.

  • Context windowMistral Small

    Mistral Small 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.

  • OpennessTie

    Both ship open weights, self-host either one.

On balance Mistral Small edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Phi-4's 0. Mistral Small publishes pricing ($0.60 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-4 does not. Mistral Small 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. Both ship open weights, self-host either one.

Phi-4 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 Small is usually picked for cheapest llm and fastest llm 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 SmallPhi-4
ProviderMistralMicrosoft
ReleasedSep 2024Dec 2024
Modalitiestexttext
Context window128K tokens16K tokens
Max output,,
Input · 1M$0.20 / 1M tokensPricing not published
Output · 1M$0.60 / 1M tokensPricing not published
Knowledge cutoff,,
Open weightsYes (Apache-2.0)Yes (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$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.

  • Mistral Small$0.050
  • 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 SmallPhi-4
  • MMLU,84.8
  • HumanEval,82.6
Pick Mistral Small if

Mistral Small fits when…

  • Apache-2.0 open-weight
  • Fast and cheap
  • 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
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 Small vs Mistral Large 2Phi-4 vs Mistral Large 2

Frequently asked

  • Is Mistral Small 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 Small accepts 128K tokens vs 16K for Phi-4.
  • Is Mistral Small or Phi-4 better for coding?
    Both Mistral Small 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?
    Both ship with open weights. Mistral Small is licensed under Apache-2.0; Phi-4 under MIT.
  • When were Mistral Small and Phi-4 released?
    Mistral Small was released by Mistral on 2024-09-18. Phi-4 was released by Microsoft on 2024-12-12.
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