Mixtral vs Mistral AI vs Llama vs Cohere
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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Mistral AI
European frontier-model lab
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Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family — Llama 4 landed, Behemoth didn't
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Cohere
Enterprise and sovereign AI — RAG-grade models, on-prem deployment
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.2 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 |
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| Value for money | ||||
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| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source | Paid |
| Free tier | Free to download and self-host | Free open-weight models for self-hosting | Free model weights for download and local use | 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. |
| Paid from | — | $0.14/1M tokens (Mistral Small via API) | — | Pay-as-you-go — Command A+ pricing on request; prior Command R from $0.15/1M in |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | 500k+ API users | 500k+ API users | 10m+ downloads | Over 17,000 active enterprise customers as of mid-2026, with $240M in annual recurring revenue. |
| Founded | — | 2023 | — | 2019 |
| Maker | Mistral AI | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Meta Platforms | Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang |
| 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... |
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... |
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... |
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... |
| 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.