Model comparison
Codestral vs Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.0 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 1.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 1 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AI
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 1 benchmark with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 0 categories and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct in 2 categories; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads 42.5 to 27.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 32.5% for Codestral and 66.7% for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $2 for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct.
- Codestral accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 131K.
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 43.0 |
| Released | 2024-05-29 | 2025-09 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 256K | 131K |
| Max output | 8K | 33K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.30 | $0.50 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.90 | $2 |
| Results tracked | 7 | 25 |
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Category by category
Coding Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Codestral: 27.3 (#321), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 42.5 (#98)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1440 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |
Reasoning Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Codestral: 19.8 (#251), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 31.1 (#81)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 66.7% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1428 |
Math Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 38.8 (#126)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Omni-MATH | — | 46.7% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1440 |
Knowledge Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 41.8 (#106)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | — | 78.6% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 9.3% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 63% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1417 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 52.1 (#93)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1407 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1460 |
| LMArena French | — | 1413 |
| LMArena German | — | 1417 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1395 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1364 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1404 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1435 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 70.8 (#159)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | — | 81% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1389 |
Long Context Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 37.0 (#223)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 55.6% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1403 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 58.0 (#121)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1417 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1334 |
| WildBench | — | 80.7% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1416 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Codestral better than Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.0 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 1.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Codestral or Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?
Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct lists at $0.50 and $2.
Is Codestral or Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct better for coding?
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct scores higher on coding benchmarks: 42.5 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Codestral does, with 256K tokens against 131K.
How many benchmarks do Codestral and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct share?
1 benchmark has published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct has 25.