Mistral: Mistral Large 4 vs Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-13.
| Mistral: Mistral Large 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 77.3 |
| Input Price | $0.68/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $2.09/M | $6.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 131,072 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 74.9 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Mistral Large 4 costs $1.20 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) costs $3.50, so Mistral Large 4 is about 2.9 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,048,576 and 1,000,000 tokens, about 1,573 and 1,500 pages.
Only Qwen3.8 Max (0902) offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Mistral Large 4 scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), Qwen3.8 Max (0902) on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Mistral Large 4 was released in October 2026 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) in September 2026.
Pick Mistral Large 4 if you need lower cost; pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) if you need video input or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Mistral: Mistral Large 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 142 |
| Code Review | 132 | 146 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 148 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 150 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 137 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 129 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 135 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 136 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 122 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 119 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 149 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 118 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →