Europe's frontier lab. Large 3 leads a lineup of cheap, focused models — Codestral for code, Pixtral for vision, Small for volume.
Mistral AI is the European counterweight to the US labs: a Paris-based frontier shop with an open-weights heritage and a paid API (La Plateforme) that undercuts the majors. It has no consumer subscription in our main comparison — Le Chat exists, but the API is the product that matters here. For teams with EU data-residency requirements, Mistral is frequently the shortlist by default.
Mistral Large 3, the flagship, sits at $2 input and $6 output per 1M tokens with a 256K window — the same sticker as Grok 4.20 and well under the Claude/GPT flagship tiers. The honest positioning: it's not benchmark-competitive with Fable 5 or GPT-5.5 at the very top, but for most production work the gap is smaller than the 2–8× price difference.
Codestral ($0.30/$0.90) is the one with a real fan base: a code-specialist with fill-in-the-middle support that slots into editors as a completion backend at a fraction of GPT or Claude rates. Small 3.1 ($0.20/$0.60) is the volume workhorse for classification, extraction, and routine generation — same price class as GPT-5.4 mini. Pixtral 12B ($0.15 flat both ways) is the budget vision option: when you need to look at thousands of images cheaply, its input rate is the lowest multimodal price on our table.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral Large 3 | $2 | $6 | 256K |
| Grok 4.20 | $2 | $6 | 256K |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2 | $12 | 1M |
| Mistral Small 3.1 | $0.20 | $0.60 | 128K |
| GPT-5.4 mini | $0.25 | $2 | 272K |
| DeepSeek V4-Pro | $0.435 | $0.87 | 1M |
At the flagship tier, Large 3 ties Grok 4.20 on price but without the real-time X data; Gemini 3.1 Pro costs the same on input with a 1M window. At the budget tier, Small 3.1 beats GPT-5.4 mini on output price, while DeepSeek V4-Pro offers more raw reasoning per dollar if Chinese-hosted infrastructure isn't a blocker. Mistral's pitch is the package: EU jurisdiction, open-weights options, and specialists like Codestral that the bigger labs don't price-match.