// head_to_head
Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Mistral Large 4
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Gemini 3.8 Flash wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
Gemini 3.8 Flash leads by 15.3 points overall while listing 25% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
Gemini 3.8 Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $1.65
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Sep 2, 2026
- Overall score
- 59.2
mistralai
Mistral Large 4
- Blended / 1M
- $2.06
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Oct 6, 2026
- Overall score
- 43.9
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 3.8 Flash | Mistral Large 4 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 59.2win | 43.9 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0166 | $0.0162 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $1.65win | $2.06 |
| Input price / 1M | $0.825win | $1.36 |
| Output price / 1M | $4.13 | $4.18 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.083win | $0.140 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 66K | 262Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 3.8 Flash on top, Mistral Large 4 below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Gemini 3.8 Flash | Mistral Large 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $474.54/mo | $572.96/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $610.50/mo | $850.80/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $574.20/mo | $739.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $1,097/mo | $1,612/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $2,104/mo | $3,208/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Gemini 3.8 Flash
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 59.2.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Gemini 3.8 Flash
Leads on long-horizon agentic — 16.5 against 8.8.
Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Mistral Large 4 FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 3.8 Flash or Mistral Large 4?
Gemini 3.8 Flash wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Gemini 3.8 Flash leads by 15.3 points overall while listing 25% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
Is Gemini 3.8 Flash cheaper than Mistral Large 4?
Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Gemini 3.8 Flash lists at $1.65 per million tokens and Mistral Large 4 at $2.06 — Gemini 3.8 Flash is 25% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Gemini 3.8 Flash charges $0.825 in and $4.13 out, Mistral Large 4 charges $1.36 and $4.18 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Gemini 3.8 Flash vs Mistral Large 4: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Gemini 3.8 Flash scores 59.2 and Mistral Large 4 scores 43.9 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That is a 15.3-point lead for Gemini 3.8 Flash. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Gemini 3.8 Flash or Mistral Large 4?
They are close. Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.0166 per point of overall capability and Mistral Large 4 costs $0.0162, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.
Does Gemini 3.8 Flash or Mistral Large 4 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for Gemini 3.8 Flash and 1.0M for Mistral Large 4.
Do Gemini 3.8 Flash and Mistral Large 4 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.083 per million for Gemini 3.8 Flash and $0.140 for Mistral Large 4, against full input rates of $0.825 and $1.36. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-10-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.