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LLM Index

Mistral vs. Phi

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

Attribute Mistral Phi
Developer Mistral AI Microsoft
Current generation Mistral 3 Phi-4
Initial release 2023-09-27 2023-06-20
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Apache 2.0 MIT
Model sizes 3B, 8B, 14B, 675B (41B active) 3.8B, 5.6B, 14B
Links
Website Pricing
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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

Phi

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Further reading

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