OpenAI vs Mistral: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of OpenAI and Mistral — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.
OpenAI
GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT model family and the ChatGPT product. Their API provides access to frontier models including GPT-4o, the o-series reasoning models, and the GPT-4.1 long-context family. Pricing is competitive for frontier-tier capability, with prompt caching available on most models.
Mistral
European frontier AI — Mistral Large, Codestral, and open models
Mistral AI is a Paris-based lab that trains both proprietary and open-weight models. Mistral Large competes with GPT-4 class models at lower prices, while Codestral is purpose-built for code generation with a 262K context window. Several Mistral models are open-weight and available for self-hosting.
Key metrics
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Live token pricing
Strengths & weaknesses
OpenAI
Mistral
Key differentiators
Frequently asked questions
OpenAI FAQs
How much does the OpenAI API cost?
GPT-4o costs $2.50/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens. GPT-4o-mini is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens. Prompt caching cuts input costs by 50% on eligible requests.
What is the difference between GPT-4o and o3?
GPT-4o is a fast, multimodal model optimised for chat, vision, and coding. o3 is a reasoning model that uses chain-of-thought to solve complex problems — it is slower and more expensive but significantly more capable on math, science, and hard coding tasks.
Does OpenAI support prompt caching?
Yes. Prompt caching is available on GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, and o4-mini. Cached input tokens are billed at 50% of the standard input price, making long-context and repeated-system-prompt workloads significantly cheaper.
Mistral FAQs
How much does the Mistral API cost?
Mistral Large costs $2.00/1M input and $6.00/1M output tokens. Mistral Small is $0.10/$0.30 per 1M tokens — one of the cheapest capable models available. Codestral for code generation is priced separately.
Are Mistral models open-weight?
Some are. Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B are open-weight and available on Hugging Face for self-hosting. Mistral Large and Codestral are proprietary and only available via the API.
What is Codestral?
Codestral is Mistral's code-specialised model with a 262K context window. It supports 80+ programming languages and is optimised for code completion, generation, and explanation tasks.