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DeepSeek vs. Mistral

LLM Comparison


DeepSeek

DeepSeek

Overview

DeepSeek develops open-weight mixture-of-experts models for reasoning, coding, agents, and efficient long-context inference. DeepSeek V4 is the current generation.


DeepSeek began releasing language models in 2023 with DeepSeek Coder, then gained broad adoption with DeepSeek V3 and the R1 reasoning model in 2024 and 2025. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, includes a 284B-parameter Flash model with 13B active parameters and a 1.6T-parameter Pro model with 49B active parameters. Both support one-million-token context windows and are released with open weights under the MIT license.


Initial release: 2023-11-29

Current generation: DeepSeek V4

Mistral

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

DeepSeek

Mistral

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License MIT Apache 2.0
Model Sizes 284B (13B active), 1.6T (49B active) 3B, 8B, 14B, 675B (41B active)