Mistral Small 3 24B vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3 Coder Next is a coding-specialized open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen3 family, built on the Qwen3-Next architecture with hybrid attention and Mixture-of-Experts design optimized for local development and agentic coding workflows. It targets on-device and self-hosted deployments requiring a capable coding agent that can operate within consumer hardware constraints.