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Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.20/$0.60. Llama 4 Maverick is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1280 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 90 tokens/sec. Llama 4 Maverick ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1290 vs 1185. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureLlama 4 MaverickMistral Small
ProviderMetaMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.150$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.600$0.600
Context Window1.048576M128K
Max Output Tokens32,7688,192
Arena ELO1,2901,185
Coding ELO1,2801,160
TTFT (ms)250160
Tokens/sec90120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source
When to Use Mistral Small

Choose Mistral Small when you need: very affordable pricing, fast inference speed, good multilingual support, suitable for lightweight tasks. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast inference speed
  • Good multilingual support
  • Suitable for lightweight tasks

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

Frequently Asked Questions

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