Mistral AI vs Perplexity AI vs Sakana AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Mistral AI
European frontier-model lab
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Perplexity AI
The answer engine that cites its sources on every live web query
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.4 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 |
| Capability | |||
| Value for money | |||
| Ease of use | |||
| ASEAN readiness | |||
| API quality | |||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free open-weight models for self-hosting | Unlimited basic searches with standard model | Sakana Chat is free; research models open-sourced on Hugging Face / GitHub |
| Paid from | $0.14/1M tokens (Mistral Small via API) | $20/month (Pro); $200/month (Max, launched July 2025) | Sakana Marlin from ¥9,800/run or ¥150,000/month (~$1,000/mo) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ API users | 30M+ standalone monthly active users (100M+ across all products, 2026) | ~300 beta users (Marlin); broader via free Sakana Chat |
| Founded | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 |
| Maker | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski | Independent (Sakana AI, Inc.) |
| Verdict | 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... |
Perplexity remains the strongest citation-first answer engine: every query triggers a live web search and each sentence links to its sources, which makes verification fast in a way plain chatbots can't match. The free ti... |
Sakana is one of the more technically credible AI labs outside the US and China -- its AI Scientist paper was the first fully AI-generated research to pass peer review, and the Darwin Godel Machine demonstrated a model t... |
| 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.