Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 53.0 |
| Input Price | $0.75/M | $1.50/M |
| Output Price | $3.75/M | $7.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 209,715 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 49.4 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 31.3 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 77.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemini 3.6 Flash costs $1.69 and Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $3.38, so Gemini 3.6 Flash is about 2.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Gemini 3.6 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Mistral Medium 3.5.
Only Gemini 3.6 Flash offers audio input and video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores higher on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization), Mistral Medium 3.5 on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Gemini 3.6 Flash was released in July 2026 and Mistral Medium 3.5 in April 2026.
Pick Gemini 3.6 Flash if you need lower cost, long documents, audio input or video input; pick Mistral Medium 3.5 if you need the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 153 |
| Code Review | 132 | 147 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 116 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 144 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 155 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 140 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 128 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 132 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 137 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 151 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 142 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 134 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 128 | 123 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 139 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 139 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 141 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 119 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 129 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →