Model Comparison 2026

Codestral vs GPT-5.5

Codestral
Mistral · Budget · Proprietary
$0.48/1M · 256K ctx
GPT-5.5
OpenAI · Frontier · Proprietary
$13/1M · 1.1M ctx

Community Vote

Pick a winner in each dimension — change your vote anytime.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for $
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results — fewer refusals, loops, and format breaks

Specs & Pricing, Side by Side

Spec
Codestral
GPT-5.5
Maker
Mistral
OpenAI
Blended price / 1M
$0.48
$13
Input / output
$0.30 in · $0.90 out / 1M tokens
$5.00 in · $30 out / 1M tokens
Context window
256K
1.1M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
No
Yes
Output Quality
6.8
9.6
Agentic Ability
6.5
9.5
Speed
9.5
7.0
Value for $
8.9
7.5
Reliability
8.8
9.0

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Codestral or GPT-5.5?

Updated 2026-06-22

Choose Codestral if you want fast completions and lightweight code edits. Choose GPT-5.5 if you want hard reasoning and coding for teams in the OpenAI ecosystem.

In our editorial scoring, GPT-5.5 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Codestral leads in 2. On price, Codestral runs about $0.48 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; GPT-5.5 is about $13 and proprietary.

Where Codestral falls short
  • Not for deep agentic planning
  • Quality below the larger coders
Full Codestral breakdown →
Where GPT-5.5 falls short
  • Premium pricing
  • Slower than mini/flash tiers
Full GPT-5.5 breakdown →

The model is half the story — the agent is the other half

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