Mistral Small 4 vs Qwen3.8 27B

Practical read: Mistral Small 4 reads four times more context. Qwen3.8 27B costs about half as much and starts answering sooner. One API key runs both.

No card required. Start with 1 million free tokens.

Side by side:

Mistral: Mistral Small 4 compared with Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B
Attribute	Mistral Small 4 `mistralai/mistral-small-2603`	Qwen3.8 27B `qwen/qwen3.8-27b`
Price, 1M in + out	$0.79 Mistral, cheapest route	$0.39 Engy, cheapest route
Best for	Long documents	Low cost and speed
Input / output, 1M	$0.16 / $0.63	$0.047 / $0.34
Cached input	$0.015825/1M	$0.01/1M to $0.180405/1M
Context window	262K 262,144 tokens	66K 65,536 tokens
First token, p50	1.00 s via Mistral	0.93 s via Crusoe
AI IQ	Unrated	IQ 115 #57 on AI IQ
Provider routes	2 with failover	21 with failover
Privacy	Zero retention route	Confidential E2EE and zero retention route
Recent route uptime range	100.00%	100.00%
Publisher	Mistral	Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
Modes	chat	chat
More detail	Overview Pricing Providers	Overview Pricing Providers

Price adds one million input and one million output tokens on the cheapest route. Prices and speed change: see the monthly reports and run a small eval before you choose a default.

Test both with your agent

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent.

Compare Mistral Small 4 and Qwen3.8 27B in this project through TrustedRouter.

1. Read https://trustedrouter.com/docs/llms.txt
2. Point the OpenAI-compatible client at
   https://api.trustedrouter.com/v1 and read the key from
   TRUSTEDROUTER_API_KEY.
3. Run our eval prompts on mistralai/mistral-small-2603, then on qwen/qwen3.8-27b.
4. Show me cost, latency and quality side by side before changing the default.

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.trustedrouter.com/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["TRUSTEDROUTER_API_KEY"],
)
for model in ("mistralai/mistral-small-2603", "qwen/qwen3.8-27b"):
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model=model,
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France?"}],
    )
    print(model, response.choices[0].message.content)

for model in mistralai/mistral-small-2603 qwen/qwen3.8-27b; do
  curl https://api.trustedrouter.com/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRUSTEDROUTER_API_KEY" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{\"model\": \"$model\", \"messages\": [{\"role\": \"user\", \"content\": \"What is the capital of France?\"}]}"
done

Your agent will need an API key.

Questions

Which should I use, Mistral: Mistral Small 4 or Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B?

Mistral Small 4 has the larger context window. Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B has the lower published input-plus-output rate, more Credits provider routes and the lower measured p50 time to first token.

Is Mistral: Mistral Small 4 or Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B cheaper?

The current cheapest TrustedRouter route is $0.79125/1M for Mistral: Mistral Small 4 and $0.385075/1M for Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B. The comparison uses current catalog prices and updates as provider pricing changes.

Is Mistral: Mistral Small 4 or Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B faster?

Current measured p50 time to first token is 998 ms for Mistral: Mistral Small 4 and 929 ms for Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B. These are routed probe measurements, not vendor-advertised speeds, and update as new samples arrive.

Can I test Mistral: Mistral Small 4 and Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B with the same API?

Yes. Use the same OpenAI-compatible TrustedRouter base URL and API key, then change only the model id between mistralai/mistral-small-2603 and qwen/qwen3.8-27b. This makes side-by-side evals possible without maintaining two provider integrations.

More comparisons

All comparisons

Try Mistral Small 4 and Qwen3.8 27B with one key.

TrustedRouter is useful when you know the model you want, but still need provider rollover, budget limits, usage records, and a prompt path you can verify.

No card required. Start with 1 million free tokens.