Mistral Large 4 vs Mistral Large 2.1 vs Inkling Small

It is close. Our weighted score puts them within 1 points (Inkling Small 68/100, Mistral Large 4 67/100, Mistral Large 2.1 38/100), so choose by what matters most for your work: Mistral Large 4 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). Mistral Large 4 costs $0.70 input / $2.10 output per million tokens (official Mistral API price); Mistral Large 2.1 costs $2.00 input / $6.00 output per million tokens (median across 2 API providers). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.795 per million tokens for Inkling Small versus $1.05 for Mistral Large 4 (1.3× as much) and $3.00 for Mistral Large 2.1 (3.8× as much).

Mistral Large 4 scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): Mistral Large 4 150.6 (#57 of 165), Inkling Small 150.5 (#58 of 165) and Mistral Large 2.1 128.6 (#142 of 165). The confidence ranges of the top two overlap (147.4–153.5 vs 147.7–152.4), so treat the gap as small. On individual benchmarks: GPQA Diamond — Inkling Small 88.5%, Mistral Large 4 88.1%, Mistral Large 2.1 51.3%; OTIS Mock AIME 2024–2025 — Mistral Large 4 98.3%, Inkling Small 90.0%, Mistral Large 2.1 7.8%.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for Mistral Large 4, Mistral Large 2.1 and Inkling Small yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, Mistral Large 4 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 131,072 for Mistral Large 2.1. Maximum output per response: Mistral Large 4 up to 262,144, Mistral Large 2.1 up to 16,384, Inkling Small up to 1,048,576 tokens.

Mistral Large 4 accepts text and images; Mistral Large 2.1 accepts text; Inkling Small accepts text, images and audio. Inkling Small handles the widest range of inputs.

Mistral Large 2.1 and Inkling Small 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. Inkling Small came out Jul 30, 2026; Mistral Large 2.1 came out Nov 18, 2024. Knowledge cutoff: Mistral Large 2.1 Nov 2024.

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.