Qwen3 32B vs Mistral Medium 3 vs DeepSeek-R1

It is close. Our weighted score puts them within 1 points (Mistral Medium 3 53/100, DeepSeek-R1 51/100, Qwen3 32B 51/100), so choose by what matters most for your work: DeepSeek-R1 for raw capability and Mistral Medium 3 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). DeepSeek-R1 costs $0.70 input / $2.60 output per million tokens (median across 11 API providers); Qwen3 32B costs $0.70 input / $2.80 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 $1.18 for DeepSeek-R1 (1.5× as much) and $1.23 for Qwen3 32B (1.5× as much).

DeepSeek-R1 scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): DeepSeek-R1 139.0 (#104 of 148), Qwen3 32B 138.5 (#106 of 148) and Mistral Medium 3 134.1 (#117 of 148). The confidence ranges of the top two overlap (136.2–140.4 vs 135.1–140.4), so treat the gap as small. On individual benchmarks: GPQA Diamond — DeepSeek-R1 71.7%, Qwen3 32B 65.7%, Mistral Medium 3 59.5%; OTIS Mock AIME 2024–2025 — Qwen3 32B 66.9%, DeepSeek-R1 53.3%, Mistral Medium 3 32.2%.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for Qwen3 32B, Mistral Medium 3 and DeepSeek-R1 yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, DeepSeek-R1 leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. All three support tool calling for agent workflows.

Qwen3 32B and Mistral Medium 3 have the largest context windows (131,072 and 131,072 tokens), against 128,000 for DeepSeek-R1. Maximum output per response: Qwen3 32B up to 16,384, Mistral Medium 3 up to 131,072, DeepSeek-R1 up to 32,768 tokens.

Qwen3 32B accepts text; Mistral Medium 3 accepts text and images; DeepSeek-R1 accepts text. Mistral Medium 3 handles the widest range of inputs.

Qwen3 32B and DeepSeek-R1 publishes its weights and can be self-hosted; Mistral Medium 3 is proprietary.

Mistral Medium 3 is the newest, released May 7, 2025. Qwen3 32B came out Apr 29, 2025; DeepSeek-R1 came out Jan 20, 2025. Knowledge cutoff: Qwen3 32B Apr 2025, Mistral Medium 3 May 2025, DeepSeek-R1 Jul 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 Oct 4, 2026.