Codestral 22B vs GPT-5 Mini

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

GPT-5 Mini

OpenAI

GPT-5 mini, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-5 family that inherits GPT-5's unified reasoning architecture and multimodal capabilities at a reduced inference cost. It targets high-volume production use cases requiring a balance of intelligence and response speed, offering GPT-5 capabilities for applications where full GPT-5 inference costs are a concern.