Codestral 22B vs Qwen2.5 14B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct is a 14-billion-parameter language model from Alibaba released in September 2024 within the Qwen2.5 family, occupying the mid-tier of the series between efficiency-focused small models and the high-capability 72B flagship. Trained on 18 trillion tokens with emphasis on instruction alignment, code understanding, and multilingual reasoning, it offers a strong performance-to-compute ratio for developers who need more capability than 7B but cannot serve 32B or larger models. The model supports 128K context windows and structured output generation out of the box.