Mistral MediumvsMixtral 8x22B
Mistral AI vs Mistral AI — Side-by-side model comparison
Head-to-Head Comparison
| Metric | Mistral Medium | Mixtral 8x22B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | ||
| Arena Rank | #16 | #16 |
| Context Window | 128K | 64K |
| Input Pricing | $0.40/1M tokens | $0.90/1M tokens |
| Output Pricing | $2.00/1M tokens | $2.70/1M tokens |
| Parameters | Undisclosed | 176B (39B active) |
| Open Source | No | Yes |
| Best For | Enterprise tasks, European languages | Efficient reasoning, multilingual, coding |
| Release Date | Jan 15, 2025 | Apr 17, 2024 |
Mistral Medium
Mistral Medium, developed by Mistral AI, is a mid-tier model with a 128K token context window designed for enterprise applications requiring balanced performance and cost. The model handles code generation, structured data extraction, summarization, and multilingual tasks with particular strength in European languages including French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Built in Paris with EU data handling practices, it appeals to organizations prioritizing data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. Priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $2.00 per million output tokens, it offers competitive pricing for its capability tier. Mistral Medium ranks #16 on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, reflecting solid mid-range performance. It serves as a practical production choice for workloads that need more capability than Mistral Small but do not require the full power of Mistral Large.
View Mistral AI profile →Mixtral 8x22B
Mixtral 8x22B, developed by Mistral AI, is a large Mixture-of-Experts model with 176 billion total parameters (39 billion active per token) and a 64K token context window. The model scales the MoE architecture to deliver stronger reasoning, coding, and multilingual performance while maintaining the efficiency advantages of sparse expert routing. It supports function calling and structured outputs for production agentic workflows. Free and open-source, Mixtral 8x22B can be deployed on enterprise GPU infrastructure for organizations requiring powerful, self-hosted AI. Priced at $0.90 per million input tokens through API providers. The model demonstrates competitive performance with proprietary models at significantly lower operational cost due to its efficient architecture. Mixtral 8x22B ranks #16 on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, confirming strong capability for an open-weight MoE model.
View Mistral AI profile →Key Differences: Mistral Medium vs Mixtral 8x22B
Mistral Medium is 1.5x cheaper on average, making it the better choice for high-volume applications.
Mistral Medium supports a larger context window (128K), allowing it to process longer documents in a single request.
Mixtral 8x22B is open-source (free to self-host and fine-tune) while Mistral Medium is proprietary (API-only access).
When to use Mistral Medium
- +Budget is a concern and you need cost efficiency
- +You need to process long documents (128K context)
- +You prefer a managed API without infrastructure overhead
- +Your use case involves enterprise tasks, european languages
When to use Mixtral 8x22B
- +Quality matters more than cost
- +You need to self-host or fine-tune the model
- +Your use case involves efficient reasoning, multilingual, coding
Cost Analysis
At current pricing, Mistral Medium is 1.5x more affordable than Mixtral 8x22B. For a typical enterprise workload processing 100M tokens per month:
Mistral Medium monthly cost
$120
100M tokens/mo (50/50 in/out)
Mixtral 8x22B monthly cost
$180
100M tokens/mo (50/50 in/out)
The Verdict
Mistral Medium wins our head-to-head comparison with 3 out of 5 category wins. It's the stronger choice for enterprise tasks, european languages, though Mixtral 8x22B holds an edge in efficient reasoning, multilingual, coding.
Last compared: April 2026 · Data sourced from public benchmarks and official pricing pages