// head_to_head
Mistral Large 4 vs Inkling
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.
Inkling wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
Inkling leads by 3.1 points overall while listing 17% 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.
mistralai
Mistral Large 4
- Blended / 1M
- $2.06
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Oct 6, 2026
- Overall score
- 43.9
thinkingmachines
Inkling
- Blended / 1M
- $1.76
- Context
- 524K
- Released
- Jul 17, 2026
- Overall score
- 47.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Mistral Large 4 | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 43.9 | 47.0win |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0162 | $0.0179 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $2.06 | $1.76win |
| Input price / 1M | $1.36 | $1.00win |
| Output price / 1M | $4.18 | $4.05 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.140win | $0.170 |
| Context window | 1.0Mwin | 524K |
| Max output tokens | 262K | 472Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Mistral Large 4 on top, Inkling 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 | Mistral Large 4 | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $572.96/mo | $504.24/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $850.80/mo | $711.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $739.20/mo | $659.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $1,612/mo | $1,262/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $3,208/mo | $2,490/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Inkling
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 47.0.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Mistral Large 4
Wider context window — 1.0M against 524K.
Mistral Large 4 vs Inkling FAQ
Which is better, Mistral Large 4 or Inkling?
Inkling wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Inkling leads by 3.1 points overall while listing 17% 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 Mistral Large 4 cheaper than Inkling?
Inkling is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Mistral Large 4 lists at $2.06 per million tokens and Inkling at $1.76 — Inkling is 17% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Mistral Large 4 charges $1.36 in and $4.18 out, Inkling charges $1.00 and $4.05 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Mistral Large 4 vs Inkling: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Mistral Large 4 scores 43.9 and Inkling scores 47.0 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That is a 3.1-point lead for Inkling. 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, Mistral Large 4 or Inkling?
They are close. Mistral Large 4 costs $0.0162 per point of overall capability and Inkling costs $0.0179, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.
Does Mistral Large 4 or Inkling have a bigger context window?
Mistral Large 4 has the larger context window: 1.0M for Mistral Large 4 against 524K for Inkling. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Mistral Large 4 and Inkling support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.140 per million for Mistral Large 4 and $0.170 for Inkling, against full input rates of $1.36 and $1.00. 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.