Mistral Medium 3.5 Open vs 
Solar Pro 3 Paid
Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Solar Pro 3 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.
$7.5 /M outputNo per-token fees if you self-host
$0.6 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Solar Pro 3 specs
| Spec | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Solar Pro 3 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Mistral AI | Upstage | – |
| Type | Open-weight | Proprietary | |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 131K tokens | |
| Input price | $1.5/M · free self-host | $0.15/M | |
| Output price | $7.5/M · free self-host | $0.6/M | |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | No | |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No (API only) | |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Proprietary |
Price gap & when to choose each
Solar Pro 3 is ~13× cheaper than Mistral Medium 3.5 on output tokens ($0.6 vs $7.5 per M tokens).
- You want to self-host or run on your cloud
- You need the longer 262K context window
- You prioritize data privacy & control
- You are building open or reproducible AI
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You want the lower output price
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
Feature comparison
| Capability | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Solar Pro 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✓ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
Benchmarks: Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Solar Pro 3
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
How Mistral Medium 3.5 and Solar Pro 3 score
| Criterion | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Solar Pro 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 4.0 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 4.0 | 3.5 |
| Openness | 5.0 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 5.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 3.5 |
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 Medium 3.5 Open
Mistral Medium 3.5 is a dense 128B instruction-following model from Mistral AI. It supports text and image inputs with text output, and is designed for agentic workflows, coding, and complex...
Solar Pro 3 Paid
Solar Pro 3 is Upstage's powerful Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model. With 102B total parameters and 12B active parameters per forward pass, it delivers exceptional performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Optimized...
Other models in these families
These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.
Frequently asked questions
Is Mistral Medium 3.5 as good as Solar Pro 3?
Mistral Medium 3.5 is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Solar Pro 3 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 Mistral Medium 3.5 locally?
Yes. Mistral Medium 3.5 has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Solar Pro 3 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.
Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Solar Pro 3 — which should I pick in 2026?
Choose Mistral Medium 3.5 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 Solar Pro 3 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.
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