Codestral 22B vs Kimi K2.5

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.

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2.5, released by Moonshot AI in January 2026, is an updated Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters. It builds on Kimi K2 with improved coding performance across multiple languages and an expanded context window. Kimi K2.5 targets agentic development workflows, polyglot code generation, and open-source deployments requiring large-scale MoE reasoning.