Phi-3 MediumvsPhi-4
Microsoft vs Microsoft — Side-by-side model comparison
Head-to-Head Comparison
| Metric | Phi-3 Medium | Phi-4 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | ||
| Arena Rank | — | #28 |
| Context Window | 128K | 16K |
| Input Pricing | Free (open)/1M tokens | Free/1M tokens |
| Output Pricing | Free (open)/1M tokens | Free/1M tokens |
| Parameters | 14B | 14B |
| Open Source | Yes | Yes |
| Best For | Balanced performance, reasoning, coding | Small model research, edge deployment, reasoning |
| Release Date | May 21, 2024 | Dec 12, 2024 |
Phi-3 Medium
Phi-3 Medium is Microsoft's 14 billion parameter model in the Phi-3 family, offering a step up in capability from Phi-3 Mini while remaining efficient enough for deployment on consumer hardware. It demonstrates that careful data curation and training methodology can produce models that compete with much larger alternatives, particularly on reasoning and STEM-related tasks.
View Microsoft profile →Phi-4
Phi-4 is Microsoft's small language model that demonstrates remarkable capability relative to its size, embodying the 'small but mighty' approach to AI. Through innovative training on high-quality synthetic and curated data, Phi-4 achieves performance comparable to much larger models on reasoning, coding, and STEM tasks. As an open-source model, it's ideal for on-device deployment, edge computing, and applications requiring local AI processing without cloud connectivity. Phi-4 has been influential in proving that model quality depends more on data quality and training methodology than raw parameter count.
View Microsoft profile →Key Differences: Phi-3 Medium vs Phi-4
Phi-3 Medium supports a larger context window (128K), allowing it to process longer documents in a single request.
Phi-3 Medium has 14B parameters vs Phi-4's 14B, which affects inference speed and capability.
When to use Phi-3 Medium
- +You need to process long documents (128K context)
- +Your use case involves balanced performance, reasoning, coding
When to use Phi-4
- +Your use case involves small model research, edge deployment, reasoning
The Verdict
Phi-4 wins our head-to-head comparison with 3 out of 5 category wins. It's the stronger choice for small model research, edge deployment, reasoning, though Phi-3 Medium holds an edge in balanced performance, reasoning, coding.
Last compared: March 2026 · Data sourced from public benchmarks and official pricing pages