Codestral 22B vs Grok 4.1 Fast

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.

Grok 4.1 Fast

xAI

Grok 4.1 Fast, released by xAI in November 2025, is a fast-response variant from the Grok 4 family featuring a 2M token context window designed for high-throughput applications. It omits thinking tokens for immediate responses, reducing latency while maintaining strong output quality. Grok 4.1 Fast targets production APIs, real-time assistants, and cost-sensitive applications requiring long-context understanding at high volume.