# Codestral vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

> Qwen2.5 72B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.9 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 5.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen2.5 72B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-qwen2-5-72b-instruct
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 2

## Summary

- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Codestral scores higher in 0 categories and Qwen2.5 72B Instruct in 2 categories; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Qwen2.5 72B Instruct leads 33.2 to 27.3.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $1.40 / $5.60 for Qwen2.5 72B Instruct.
- Codestral accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 131K.
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 31.9 |
| Rank | 290 | 267 |
| Context | 256K | 131K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $1.40 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $5.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 27.3 (#321)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 33.2 (#260)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | 45.8% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | 55.9% |
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| WeirdML | — | 16% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1292 |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 22.1 (#133)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| TheAgentCompany | — | 5.7% |
| BALROG | — | 16.2% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 35.8% |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.8 (#251)
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 22.3 (#199)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1271 |
| DTBench | — | 62.9% |
| LMCA | — | 13.4% |
| BIG-Bench Hard | — | 79.8% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 129 |
| ForecastBench | — | 57.5 |
| HellaSwag | — | 84.8% |
| PIQA | — | 82.6% |
| WinoGrande | — | 82.3% |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 19.3 (#287)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 8.1% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 33% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1283 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 63.2% |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 27.0 (#253)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 49.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 63.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 19.1% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 42.6% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1245 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 94.5% |
| MMLU | — | 85.3% |
| TriviaQA | — | 71.9% |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 41.0 (#213)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1252 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1272 |
| LMArena French | — | 1280 |
| LMArena German | — | 1234 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1180 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1264 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1256 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 65.5 (#221)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | — | 80.6% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1254 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 38.9 (#188)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1282 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 46.7 (#215)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen2.5 72B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1269 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1221 |
| WildBench | — | 80.2% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1272 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Qwen2.5 72B Instruct?

Qwen2.5 72B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.9 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 5.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen2.5 72B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Qwen2.5 72B Instruct?

Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Qwen2.5 72B Instruct lists at $1.40 and $5.60.

### Is Codestral or Qwen2.5 72B Instruct better for coding?

Qwen2.5 72B Instruct scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.2 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 Qwen2.5 72B Instruct share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Qwen2.5 72B Instruct has 43.