AI Models · Open-Source vs Paid

Mistral Medium 3.5 Open vs Sonar Paid

Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Sonar compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.

Sonar — full profile ›

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai

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

Mistral Medium 3.5OpenMistral AI

$1.5 /M input
$7.5 /M outputNo per-token fees if you self-host

TypeOpen-weight

Context window262K tokens

MultimodalYes

Self-hostYes

SonarPaidPerplexity

$1 /M input
$1 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)

TypeProprietary

Context window127K tokens

MultimodalYes

Self-hostNo

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 Sonar if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Sonar specs

Spec	Mistral Medium 3.5	Sonar	Winner
Maker	Mistral AI	Perplexity	–
Type	Open-weight	Proprietary	Mistral Medium 3.5
Context window	262K tokens	127K tokens	Mistral Medium 3.5
Input price	$1.5/M · free self-host	$1/M	Sonar
Output price	$7.5/M · free self-host	$1/M	Sonar
Vision / multimodal	Yes	Yes	= Tie
Tool / function calling	Yes	No	Mistral Medium 3.5
Self-hostable	Yes	No (API only)	Mistral Medium 3.5
License	Apache 2.0	Proprietary	Mistral Medium 3.5

Price gap & when to choose each

7.5×cheaper per output token

Sonar is ~7.5× cheaper than Mistral Medium 3.5 on output tokens ($1 vs $7.5 per M tokens).

Choose Mistral Medium 3.5 if…

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

Choose Sonar if…

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	Sonar
Open weights (downloadable)	✓	✗
Self-hostable	✓	✗
Runs fully offline	✓	✗
Vision / multimodal	✓	✓
Tool / function calling	✓	✗
1M+ context window	✗	✗

Benchmarks: Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Sonar

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

Mistral Medium 3.5

Sonar

Intelligence index

14.9

7.7

Coding index

46.9

–

GPQA

74.8%

47.1%

Humanity's Last Exam

13.8%

4.9%

Long Context Reasoning

69.3%

–

SciCode

40.2%

–

IFBench

68.8%

–

τ²-Bench

94.2%

–

τ-Bench Banking

15.1%

–

Terminal-Bench

50.6%

–

Terminal-Bench Hard

33.3%

–

MMLU-Pro

–

68.9%

LiveCodeBench

–

29.5%

MATH-500

–

81.7%

AIME

–

48.7%

Speed

142.2 tok/s

0 tok/s

Latency

0.74s

Intelligence per $

–

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How Mistral Medium 3.5 and Sonar score

🏆 Best value & openness: Mistral Medium 3.5 (4.6 vs 2.7 / 5)

Criterion	Mistral Medium 3.5	Sonar
Cost-efficiency	4.0	4.5
Context window	4.0	3.0
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 AI · Open-weight

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...

Sonar Paid

Perplexity · Proprietary

Sonar is lightweight, affordable, fast, and simple to use — now featuring citations and the ability to customize sources. It is designed for companies seeking to integrate lightweight question-and-answer features...

Other models in these families

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

Other variants tracked

Mistral Medium 3.5 (batch)Mistral Small 4Mistral Small 4 (batch)Mistral Medium 3.1Mistral Medium 3.1 (batch)Mistral Large 3 2512Mistral Large 3 2512 (batch)Devstral 2 2512Mistral Medium 3Mistral Small 3.1 24BMistral Small 3.2 24BMistral LargeMistral Large 2407Mistral Small 3SabaMinistral 3 14B 2512Mixtral 8x22B InstructMinistral 3 8B 2512Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch)Ministral 3 3B 2512UncensoredCodestral 2508Codestral 2508 (batch)Voxtral Small 24B 2507Mistral Nemo

Frequently asked questions

Is Mistral Medium 3.5 as good as Sonar?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Sonar 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. Sonar is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.

Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Sonar — 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 Sonar if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

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