Model comparison 2026

Codestral vs Mistral Large 4

Codestral
Mistral · Budget · Proprietary
$0.48/1M · 256K ctx
Mistral Large 4
Mistral · Balanced · Open weights
$1.10/1M · 1.0M ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

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 money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Codestral
Mistral Large 4
Maker
Mistral
Mistral
Blended price / 1M
$0.48
$1.10
Input / output
$0.30 in · $0.90 out / 1M tokens
$0.68 in · $2.09 out / 1M tokens
Context window
256K
1.0M
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
No
Yes
Output Quality
3.4
7.6
Agentic Ability
5.0
7.1
Speed
9.5
7.0
Value for money
6.4
5.9
Reliability
8.4
8.8

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

Verdict: Codestral or Mistral Large 4?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Codestral if you want fast completions and lightweight code edits. Choose Mistral Large 4 if you want open-weight, EU-provenance agent work that needs long context and image input.

In our editorial scoring, Mistral Large 4 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; Mistral Large 4 is about $1.10 and open-weight.

Where Codestral falls short
  • Not built for agentic planning
  • No independent agent benchmark results
Full Codestral breakdown →
Where Mistral Large 4 falls short
  • Still a public preview, so behavior and price can change
  • 26.8% in Artificial Analysis's Terminal-Bench 4.0 run, well below the frontier models
Full Mistral Large 4 breakdown →

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