Mistral Medium 3 vs Qwen3.5 Plus

Qwen3.5 Plus is the better all-round choice, scoring 66/100 against Mistral Medium 3 (53). It leads on capability, inputs & features and context window. Mistral Medium 3 wins on price. The score weighs capability 50%, price 25%, inputs & features 15%, context window 10%.

Mistral Medium 3 is cheaper at $0.40 input / $2.00 output per million tokens (official Mistral API price). Qwen3.5 Plus costs $0.40 input / $2.40 output per million tokens (official Alibaba API price). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.80 per million tokens for Mistral Medium 3 versus $0.90 for Qwen3.5 Plus (1.1× as much).

Qwen3.5 Plus scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): Qwen3.5 Plus 146.8 (#65 of 148) and Mistral Medium 3 134.1 (#117 of 148). Their confidence ranges do not overlap (144.6–148.1 vs 130.5–135.6), so the gap is a real one. On individual benchmarks: GPQA Diamond — Qwen3.5 Plus 84.9%, Mistral Medium 3 59.5%; OTIS Mock AIME 2024–2025 — Qwen3.5 Plus 86.7%, Mistral Medium 3 32.2%.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for Mistral Medium 3 and Qwen3.5 Plus yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, Qwen3.5 Plus leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. Both support tool calling for agent workflows.

Qwen3.5 Plus has the largest context window at 1,000,000 tokens, against 131,072 for Mistral Medium 3. Maximum output per response: Mistral Medium 3 up to 131,072, Qwen3.5 Plus up to 65,536 tokens.

Mistral Medium 3 accepts text and images; Qwen3.5 Plus accepts text, images and video. Qwen3.5 Plus handles the widest range of inputs.

No. Mistral Medium 3 and Qwen3.5 Plus are proprietary and only available through APIs and apps.

Qwen3.5 Plus is the newest, released Feb 16, 2026. Mistral Medium 3 came out May 7, 2025. Knowledge cutoff: Mistral Medium 3 May 2025, Qwen3.5 Plus Apr 2025.

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 Oct 4, 2026.