Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Mistral Large 3 vs Step 5 Preview

Mistral Large 3
Mistral · Balanced · Open weights
$0.80/1M · 262K ctx
Step 5 Preview
StepFun · Balanced · Proprietary
$1.51/1M · 1M 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
Mistral Large 3
Step 5
Maker
Mistral
StepFun
Blended price / 1M
$0.80
$1.51
Input / output
$0.50 in · $1.50 out / 1M tokens
$1.00 in · $2.70 out / 1M tokens
Context window
262K
1M
Open weights
Yes
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
No
Yes
Output Quality
3.4
8.2
Agentic Ability
4.4
7.6
Speed
7.0
7.5
Value for money
5.5
7.1
Reliability
8.4
8.6

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

Verdict: Mistral Large 3 or Step 5?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Mistral Large 3 if you want general open-weight text work where EU provenance matters. Choose Step 5 Preview if you want mid-priced agent loops that want more capability than a Flash-class model.

In our editorial scoring, Step 5 Preview leads in 5 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed, value for money and reliability), while Mistral Large 3 leads in 0. On price, Mistral Large 3 runs about $0.80 per 1M tokens (blended) and is open-weight; Step 5 Preview is about $1.51 and proprietary.

Where Mistral Large 3 falls short
  • Not suited to agentic coding (0% in Artificial Analysis's Terminal-Bench 4.0 run)
  • 262K context, smaller than 11.7% of the coding-agent requests we measured
Full Mistral Large 3 breakdown →
Where Step 5 falls short
  • Still a preview, so behavior and price can change
  • Only StepFun serves it on OpenRouter, so there is no provider fallback
Full Step 5 breakdown →

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