Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Codestral 22B leads with 3.5% higher average benchmark score. Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct supports multimodal inputs. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
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.
Mistral AI
Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24-billion-parameter multimodal model from Mistral AI, released in March 2025 as an update to Mistral Small 3 that added vision understanding and expanded the context window from 32K to 128K tokens. The model accepts both text and image inputs, broadening its applicability to document analysis, image-grounded reasoning, and mixed-media workflows without requiring an increase in parameter count. Released under Apache 2.0, it continued Mistral's pattern of incremental capability gains delivered in compact, practically deployable open-weight packages.
9 months newer

Codestral 22B
Mistral AI
2024-05-29

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Mistral AI
2025-03-17
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
Codestral 22B
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Codestral 22B
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Available providers and their performance metrics
Codestral 22B
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Codestral 22B
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct