# Llama 3-8B vs Mistral Medium 3.1

> Mistral Medium 3.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.5 to 25.3 on the Noometry Index. Llama 3-8B costs 5.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/llama-3-8b-vs-mistral-medium-3-1
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Medium 3.1 leads 55.6 to 37.7.
- Llama 3-8B is cheaper at $0.14 / $0.14 per million input/output tokens, against $0.40 / $2 for Mistral Medium 3.1.
- Mistral Medium 3.1 accepts more context: 131K tokens versus 8K.
- Llama 3-8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 25.3 | 31.5 |
| Rank | 338 | 260 |
| Context | 8K | 131K |
| Input $/M | $0.14 | $0.40 |
| Output $/M | $0.14 | $2 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Llama 3-8B: 30.5 (#285)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 31.9% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1152 | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 36.9% | — |
| HumanEval+ | 56.7% | — |
| MBPP+ | 54.8% | — |

## Reasoning

- Llama 3-8B: 13.8 (#321)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: 10.1 (#336)

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 6.5% |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | — | 20.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1133 | — |
| DTBench | 43.9% | — |
| Adversarial NLI | 57.3% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 116.33 | — |
| ForecastBench | 58.6 | — |
| WinoGrande | 75.7% | — |

## Math

- Llama 3-8B: 8.3 (#317)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1151 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 6.1% | — |

## Knowledge

- Llama 3-8B: 7.8 (#303)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 26.1% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1113 | — |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 82.8% | — |
| MMLU | 68.8% | — |
| OpenBookQA | 82.6% | — |
| TriviaQA | 67.7% | — |

## Multilingual

- Llama 3-8B: 31.0 (#256)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1098 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1076 | — |
| LMArena French | 1158 | — |
| LMArena German | 1104 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 967 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1003 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1109 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1172 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Llama 3-8B: 58.7 (#255)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1127 | — |

## Long Context

- Llama 3-8B: 34.2 (#246)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1128 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Llama 3-8B: 37.7 (#251)
- Mistral Medium 3.1: 55.6 (#140)

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Medium 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1166 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1150 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1476 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1152 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Llama 3-8B better than Mistral Medium 3.1?

Mistral Medium 3.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.5 to 25.3 on the Noometry Index. Llama 3-8B costs 5.7× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Llama 3-8B or Mistral Medium 3.1?

Llama 3-8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.14 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium 3.1 lists at $0.40 and $2.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Medium 3.1 does, with 131K tokens against 8K.

### How many benchmarks do Llama 3-8B and Mistral Medium 3.1 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Llama 3-8B has 34 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.1 has 3.