Mixtral vs Cohere vs Llama vs Mistral AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Mixtral
Mistral's open-weight mixture-of-experts model, Apache 2.0 licensed
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Cohere
Enterprise and sovereign AI — RAG-grade models, on-prem deployment
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Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family — Llama 4 landed, Behemoth didn't
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Mistral AI
European frontier-model lab
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.2 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Paid | Open Source | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free to download and self-host | 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 model weights for download and local use | 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 | 500k+ API users | Over 17,000 active enterprise customers as of mid-2026, with $240M in annual recurring revenue. | 10m+ downloads | 500k+ API users |
| Founded | 2023 | 2019 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | Mistral AI | Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang | Meta Platforms | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix |
| Verdict | Mixtral (8x7B and 8x22B) was Mistral AI's proof that sparse mixture-of-experts could match dense models at a fraction of the active-parameter cost, and the Apache 2.0 license made it genuinely usable in production withou... |
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... |
Llama is still the backbone of the open-weight LLM ecosystem — Llama 2 and 3 built it, and Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick, shipped April 2025) kept it going, with a huge footprint on Hugging Face, Ollama, Together AI and Fi... |
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... |
| 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.