Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Mistral AI's Mistral Small 4 and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | Mistral Small 4 | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Mistral AI | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.15 | $0.90 | Mistral Small 4 (83% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.015 | $0.18 | Mistral Small 4 lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.60 | $1.60 | Mistral Small 4 lower |
| Context Window | 256k | 128k | Mistral Small 4 (256k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Mistral Tekken Tokenizer (131k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Mistral Small 4 when your engineering requirements prioritize Mistral AI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Mistral Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.15/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.