AI21 Labs vs Cohere vs Mistral AI vs Reka AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
AI21 Labs
Jamba's 256K-context LLMs and Maestro, AI21's enterprise agent planner
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Cohere
Enterprise and sovereign AI — RAG-grade models, on-prem deployment
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Mistral AI
European frontier-model lab
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Reka AI
Multimodal frontier models from Reka
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 7.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | Trial API key: 1,000 free API calls per month across all endpoints (non-commercial use only); Chat endpoints rate-limited to 20 req/min; text Embed rate-limited to 2,000 inputs/min. | Free open-weight models for self-hosting | — |
| Paid from | — | Pay-as-you-go — Command A+ pricing on request; prior Command R from $0.15/1M in | $0.14/1M tokens (Mistral Small via API) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | Over 17,000 active enterprise customers as of mid-2026, with $240M in annual recurring revenue. | 500k+ API users | — |
| Founded | — | 2019 | 2023 | 2022 |
| Maker | — | Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | — |
| Verdict | AI21 built Jamba around a hybrid Mamba-transformer architecture rather than following the pack into pure transformers, and the payoff is a genuinely long 256K-token context window at competitive per-token rates — Jamba M... |
Cohere's pitch is deployment control, not frontier benchmarks. Embed and Rerank remain among the strongest retrieval models for RAG and enterprise search, and the Command line was refreshed in May 2026 with Command A+, a... |
Mistral is the strongest European alternative to the US labs, and its open-weight releases are the reason: Mistral Large 3 (December 2025) ships as a 675B-parameter MoE under Apache 2.0 with a 256K context window, Medium... |
Reka AI is a research-led lab building natively multimodal models (Core, Flash, Edge, Spark) that handle text, image, audio and video, with Core approaching GPT-4V-class performance on several benchmarks. It offers an AP... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.