Codestral 22B vs Qwen3-235B-A22B

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

Qwen3-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on April 28, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window, hybrid thinking capabilities (both reasoning and direct generation modes), and was trained on 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages. Qwen3-235B targets complex reasoning, multilingual tasks, and open-source deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.