Mistral Large Paid vs Mistral Medium 3.1 Paid
Mistral Large vs Mistral Medium 3.1 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Mistral Large — full profile › · Mistral Medium 3.1 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
$6 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
$2 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
Mistral Large vs Mistral Medium 3.1 specs
| Spec | Mistral Large | Mistral Medium 3.1 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Mistral AI | Mistral AI | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 131K tokens | |
| Input price | $2/M | $0.4/M | |
| Output price | $6/M | $2/M | |
| Vision / multimodal | No | Yes | |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Price gap & when to choose each
Mistral Medium 3.1 is ~3.0× cheaper than Mistral Large on output tokens ($2 vs $6 per M tokens).
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You need the longer 131K context window
- You want the lower output price
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
Feature comparison
| Capability | Mistral Large | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✗ | ✓ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
Benchmarks: Mistral Large vs Mistral Medium 3.1
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
How Mistral Large and Mistral Medium 3.1 score
| Criterion | Mistral Large | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 4.0 | 4.5 |
| Context window | 3.5 | 3.5 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 3.5 | 5.0 |
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
Mistral Large Paid
This is Mistral AI's flagship model, Mistral Large 2 (version `mistral-large-2407`). It's a proprietary weights-available model and excels at reasoning, code, JSON, chat, and more. Read the launch announcement [here](https://mistral.ai/news
Mistral Medium 3.1 Paid
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...
Frequently asked questions
Mistral Large vs Mistral Medium 3.1 — which is cheaper?
Mistral Medium 3.1 is cheaper on output ($2/M vs $6/M).
Which has the larger context window?
Mistral Medium 3.1 offers the larger context window (131K tokens).
Mistral Large vs Mistral Medium 3.1 — which should I pick in 2026?
Choose Mistral Medium 3.1 for the lower output price ($2/M vs $6/M). It also gives you the larger 131K context window.
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 →