# Codestral vs Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct

> Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.5 to 30.1 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.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-qwen3-next-80b-a3b-instruct
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 1

## 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 41.9 to 26.9.
- 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.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.1 | 42.5 |
| Rank | 287 | 100 |
| Context | 256K | 131K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $0.50 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $2 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 26.9 (#316)
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 41.9 (#101)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1441 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.1 (#244)
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 30.1 (#79)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | 66.7% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1428 |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 36.3 (#118)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Omni-MATH | — | 46.7% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1440 |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 41.3 (#102)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | — | 78.6% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 9.3% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 63% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1416 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 52.3 (#88)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1407 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1461 |
| LMArena French | — | 1415 |
| LMArena German | — | 1416 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1398 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1366 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1403 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1436 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 71.0 (#154)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | — | 81% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1388 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 37.0 (#218)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 55.6% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1403 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 58.2 (#116)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1417 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1333 |
| WildBench | — | 80.7% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1415 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?

Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.5 to 30.1 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: 41.9 versus 26.9 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.