AI Models · Open-Source vs Paid

Llama 4 Maverick Open vs Mistral Medium 3.1 Paid

Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Medium 3.1 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai

Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.

Choose Llama 4 Maverick if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Mistral Medium 3.1 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Medium 3.1 specs

SpecLlama 4 MaverickMistral Medium 3.1
MakerMetaMistral AI
TypeOpen-weightProprietary
Context window1M tokens131K tokens
Input price$0.2/M · free self-host$0.4/M
Output price$0.8/M · free self-host$2/M
Vision / multimodalYesYes
Tool / function callingYesYes
Self-hostableYesNo (API only)
LicenseLlama CommunityProprietary

Feature comparison

CapabilityLlama 4 MaverickMistral Medium 3.1
Open weights (downloadable)
Self-hostable
Runs fully offline
Vision / multimodal
Tool / function calling
1M+ context window

Benchmarks: Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Medium 3.1

Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).

Llama 4 Maverick
Mistral Medium 3.1
Intelligence index
14.3
14.7
Coding index
16.3
20.5
Math index
19.3
38.3
GPQA
67.1%
58.8%
MMLU-Pro
80.9%
68.3%
Humanity's Last Exam
4.8%
4.4%
Long Context Reasoning
46%
19.7%
LiveCodeBench
39.7%
40.6%
SciCode
33.1%
33.8%
MATH-500
88.9%
AIME
39%
AIME 2025
19.3%
38.3%
IFBench
43%
39.8%
τ²-Bench
17.8%
40.6%
τ-Bench Banking
3.9%
8.5%
Terminal-Bench
7.9%
13.9%
Terminal-Bench Hard
6.8%
10.6%
Speed
104.6 tok/s
0 tok/s
Latency
0.66s
0s
Intelligence per $
34.5
18.4

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How Llama 4 Maverick and Mistral Medium 3.1 score

🏆 Best value & openness: Llama 4 Maverick (5.0 vs 3.1 / 5)
CriterionLlama 4 MaverickMistral Medium 3.1
Cost-efficiency5.04.5
Context window5.03.5
Openness5.01.5
Self-hosting5.01.0
Multimodality5.05.0

Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.

What each model is

Llama 4 Maverick Open

Meta · Open-weight

Llama 4 Maverick 17B Instruct (128E) is a high-capacity multimodal language model from Meta, built on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with 128 experts and 17 billion active parameters per forward...

Mistral Medium 3.1 Paid

Mistral AI · Proprietary

Mistral Medium 3.1 is an updated version of Mistral Medium 3, which is a high-performance enterprise-grade language model designed to deliver frontier-level capabilities at significantly reduced operational cost. It balances...

Other models in these families

These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.

Other variants tracked
Llama 4 ScoutR1 Distill Llama 70BLlama 3.3 70B InstructLlama 3.1 8B InstructLlama 3.1 70B InstructHermes 3 70B InstructLlama 3.2 3B InstructLlama 3.2 1B InstructAion-RP 1.0 (8B)Hermes 3 405B InstructLlama 3.1 Euryale 70B v2.2Llama 3.3 Euryale 70BLlama Guard 4 12BLlama 3 8B Lunaris

Frequently asked questions

Is Llama 4 Maverick as good as Mistral Medium 3.1?

Llama 4 Maverick is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Mistral Medium 3.1 may still lead on the hardest reasoning and agentic work. The gap keeps narrowing — benchmark both on your actual use case before deciding.

Can I run Llama 4 Maverick locally?

Yes. Llama 4 Maverick has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Mistral Medium 3.1 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.

How much cheaper is Llama 4 Maverick?

Llama 4 Maverick costs $0.8/M output vs $2/M for Mistral Medium 3.1 — roughly 3x cheaper via API, and free if you self-host.

Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Medium 3.1 — which should I pick in 2026?

Choose Llama 4 Maverick if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Mistral Medium 3.1 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

People also compare

Explore more open-source AI

Browse the full open-source model leaderboard, thousands of tools and live benchmarks — all in one place.

Open the leaderboard →