Mistral Large 4 vs Inkling Small vs Qwen3.8 27B

It is close. Our weighted score puts them within 1 points (Inkling Small 68/100, Mistral Large 4 67/100, Qwen3.8 27B 66/100), so choose by what matters most for your work: Qwen3.8 27B for raw capability and Inkling Small on price. The score weighs capability 50%, price 25%, inputs & features 15%, context window 10%.

Inkling Small is cheaper at $0.58 input / $1.44 output per million tokens (official Thinking Machines API price). Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.40 input / $2.55 output per million tokens (median across 49 API providers); Mistral Large 4 costs $0.70 input / $2.10 output per million tokens (official Mistral API price). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.795 per million tokens for Inkling Small versus $0.938 for Qwen3.8 27B (1.2× as much) and $1.05 for Mistral Large 4 (1.3× as much).

Qwen3.8 27B scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): Qwen3.8 27B 151.8 (#54 of 165), Mistral Large 4 150.6 (#57 of 165) and Inkling Small 150.5 (#58 of 165). The confidence ranges of the top two overlap (149.9–153.6 vs 147.4–153.5), so treat the gap as small.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for Mistral Large 4, Inkling Small and Qwen3.8 27B yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, Qwen3.8 27B leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. All three support tool calling for agent workflows.

Mistral Large 4 and Inkling Small have the largest context windows (1,048,576 and 1,048,576 tokens), against 262,144 for Qwen3.8 27B. Maximum output per response: Mistral Large 4 up to 262,144, Inkling Small up to 1,048,576, Qwen3.8 27B up to 32,768 tokens.

Mistral Large 4 accepts text and images; Inkling Small accepts text, images and audio; Qwen3.8 27B accepts text, images and video. Inkling Small handles the widest range of inputs.

Inkling Small and Qwen3.8 27B publishes its weights (Apache-2.0) and can be self-hosted; Mistral Large 4 is proprietary.

Mistral Large 4 is the newest, released Oct 6, 2026. Qwen3.8 27B came out Aug 14, 2026; Inkling Small came out Jul 30, 2026.

Each model gets a 0–100 score on capability (50%, independent benchmark results); price (25%, blended price per million tokens (3 input : 1 output), log scale); inputs & features (15%, image, PDF, audio and video input, tool calling, structured output and reasoning); context window (10%, maximum tokens per request, log scale). Dimensions missing for any model are dropped and the remaining weights rescaled, so every model is judged on the same evidence. Specs and prices come from public model listings and the labs’ own API pages; capability scores come from independent benchmark runs. Data updated Nov 2, 2026.