Get started
LLM Index

Llama vs. Mistral

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute Llama Mistral
Developer Meta Mistral AI
Current generation Llama 4 Mistral 3
Initial release 2023-02-24 2023-09-27
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Llama Community License Apache 2.0
Model sizes 109B (17B active), 400B (17B active) 3B, 8B, 14B, 675B (41B active)
Links
Website
Website Pricing

Llama

Llama is Meta's open-weight model family. Llama 4 was its last major generation; Meta's active assistant-model development has shifted to Muse.

Meta introduced LLaMA in February 2023, helping catalyze the modern open-weight model ecosystem. Llama 2 added commercial use and chat tuning, while the Llama 3 series improved scale, multilingual support, and instruction following. Llama 4, released in April 2025, introduced native multimodality and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Meta subsequently shifted its actively promoted assistant-model line to the proprietary Muse family, but Llama models remain widely used and deployed.

Further reading

Mistral

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.

Further reading

Compare other models

Other Llama comparisons

Other Mistral comparisons