Kimi vs. Mistral
LLM Comparison
Kimi
Overview
Kimi is Moonshot AI's open-weight family for long-context reasoning, coding, multimodal agents, and research. Kimi K3 is the current generation.
Moonshot AI launched Kimi in 2023 with an early focus on long-context document understanding. Kimi K3, released in July 2026, is a 2.8T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 104B active parameters. It combines native vision, a one-million-token context window, long-horizon coding, knowledge work, reasoning, and agent orchestration. The full model weights are available under the Kimi K3 License.
Initial release: 2023-10-09
Current generation: Kimi K3
Mistral
Overview
Mistral is a family of efficient open and hosted models spanning edge deployment through frontier-scale multimodal workloads. Mistral 3 is the current generation.
Mistral AI launched Mistral 7B in September 2023 and followed it with the Mixtral mixture-of-experts models and hosted Small and Large tiers. Mistral 3, released in December 2025 under Apache 2.0, includes dense 3B, 8B, and 14B Ministral models plus Mistral Large 3, a 675B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 41B active parameters. The family supports instruction tuning, reasoning variants, multilingual use, code, and image understanding.
Initial release: 2023-09-27
Current generation: Mistral 3
Kimi |
Mistral |
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|---|---|---|
| Products & Features | ||
| Instruct Models | ||
| Coding Capability | ||
| Customization | ||
| Finetuning | ||
| Open Source | ||
| License | Kimi K3 License | Apache 2.0 |
| Model Sizes | 2.8T (104B active) | 3B, 8B, 14B, 675B (41B active) |