Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash vs Mistral: Mistral Small 4
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | mistralai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 6.1 |
| Input Price | $0.19/M | $0.15/M |
| Output Price | $1.12/M | $0.60/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 209,715 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 7.7 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Mistral Small 4 costs $0.30 and Qwen3.6 Flash costs $0.47, so Mistral Small 4 is about 1.6 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.6 Flash reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Mistral Small 4.
Only Qwen3.6 Flash offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 Flash scores higher on 14 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others), Mistral Small 4 on 6 (Regex Writing, Frontend Component Design, Data Analysis and others).
Qwen3.6 Flash was released in April 2026 and Mistral Small 4 in March 2026.
Pick Qwen3.6 Flash if you need long documents, video input or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Mistral Small 4 if you need lower cost.
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 | Qwen: Qwen3.6 Flash | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 132 |
| Code Review | 132 | 127 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 129 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 131 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 122 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 127 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 120 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 118 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 125 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 128 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 123 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 128 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 128 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 130 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →