AI Models · Open-Source vs Paid

DeepSeek V4 Pro Open vs Mistral Medium 3 Paid

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Mistral Medium 3 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai

Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.

Choose DeepSeek V4 Pro if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Mistral Medium 3 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Mistral Medium 3 specs

SpecDeepSeek V4 ProMistral Medium 3
MakerDeepSeekMistral AI
TypeOpen-weightProprietary
Context window1M tokens131K tokens
Input price$0.44/M · free self-host$0.4/M
Output price$0.87/M · free self-host$2/M
Vision / multimodalNoYes
Tool / function callingYesYes
Self-hostableYesNo (API only)
LicenseMITProprietary

Feature comparison

CapabilityDeepSeek V4 ProMistral Medium 3
Open weights (downloadable)
Self-hostable
Runs fully offline
Vision / multimodal
Tool / function calling
1M+ context window

Benchmarks: DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Mistral Medium 3

Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).

DeepSeek V4 Pro delivers 5.2× more intelligence per dollar.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
Mistral Medium 3
Intelligence index
44.3
12.5
Coding index
59.4
GPQA
88.8%
57.8%
Humanity's Last Exam
35.9%
4.3%
Long Context Reasoning
66.3%
28%
SciCode
50%
33.1%
IFBench
76.5%
39.3%
τ²-Bench
96.2%
24.3%
τ-Bench Banking
25.8%
Terminal-Bench
64%
Terminal-Bench Hard
46.2%
3.8%
Math index
30.3
MMLU-Pro
76%
LiveCodeBench
40%
MATH-500
90.7%
AIME
44%
AIME 2025
30.3%
Speed
70.8 tok/s
0 tok/s
Latency
0.91s
0s
Intelligence per $
81.4
15.6

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How DeepSeek V4 Pro and Mistral Medium 3 score

🏆 Best value & openness: DeepSeek V4 Pro (4.7 vs 3.1 / 5)
CriterionDeepSeek V4 ProMistral Medium 3
Cost-efficiency5.04.5
Context window5.03.5
Openness5.01.5
Self-hosting5.01.0
Multimodality3.55.0

Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.

What each model is

DeepSeek V4 Pro Open

DeepSeek · Open-weight

DeepSeek V4 Pro is a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts model from DeepSeek with 1.6T total parameters and 49B activated parameters, supporting a 1M-token context window. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding,...

Mistral Medium 3 Paid

Mistral AI · Proprietary

Mistral Medium 3 is a high-performance enterprise-grade language model designed to deliver frontier-level capabilities at significantly reduced operational cost. It balances state-of-the-art reasoning and multimodal performance with 8× lowe

Other models in these families

These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.

Other variants tracked
DeepSeek V4 FlashDeepSeek V3.1 TerminusDeepSeek V3.2 ExpDeepSeek V3.2DeepSeek V3.1R1 0528R1DeepSeek V3 0324DeepSeek V3

Frequently asked questions

Is DeepSeek V4 Pro as good as Mistral Medium 3?

DeepSeek V4 Pro is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Mistral Medium 3 may still lead on the hardest reasoning and agentic work. The gap keeps narrowing — benchmark both on your actual use case before deciding.

Can I run DeepSeek V4 Pro locally?

Yes. DeepSeek V4 Pro has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Mistral Medium 3 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.

How much cheaper is DeepSeek V4 Pro?

DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $0.87/M output vs $2/M for Mistral Medium 3 — roughly 2x cheaper via API, and free if you self-host.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Mistral Medium 3 — which should I pick in 2026?

Choose DeepSeek V4 Pro if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Mistral Medium 3 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

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