Mistral: Mistral Small 4 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 6.1 | 55.6 |
| Input Price | $0.15/M | $0.26/M |
| Output Price | $0.60/M | $2.60/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 209,715 | 81,920 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 7.7 | 55.7 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Mistral Small 4 costs $0.30 and Qwen3.5-27B costs $0.91, so Mistral Small 4 is about 3.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.5-27B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.5-27B leads 55.6 to 6.1.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Mistral Small 4 scores higher on 2 (JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling), Qwen3.5-27B on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Mistral Small 4 was released in March 2026 and Qwen3.5-27B in February 2026.
Pick Mistral Small 4 if you need lower cost; pick Qwen3.5-27B if you need video input, benchmark performance or 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 | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 132 | 137 |
| Code Review | 127 | 137 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 129 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 131 | 141 |
| Unit Test Generation | 122 | 127 |
| Code Documentation | 127 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 120 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 118 | 123 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 128 |
| Data Analysis | 125 | 132 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 130 |
| ETL Scripting | 123 | 130 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 130 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 124 | 126 |
| Blog Post Writing | 120 | 125 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →