# Mistral Medium vs Qwen Max

> Mistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.3 to 34.7 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mistral-medium-vs-qwen-max
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 21

## Summary

- They share 21 benchmarks with published results for both. Mistral Medium scores higher in 6 categories and Qwen Max in 2 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Medium leads 60.0 to 47.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 32.2% for Mistral Medium and 16.1% for Qwen Max.
- Qwen Max is cheaper at $1.60 / $6.40 per million input/output tokens, against $1.50 / $7.50 for Mistral Medium.
- Mistral Medium accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 33K.
- Mistral Medium has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 36.3 | 34.7 |
| Rank | 218 | 230 |
| Context | 262K | 33K |
| Input $/M | $1.50 | $1.60 |
| Output $/M | $7.50 | $6.40 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mistral Medium: 34.2 (#243)
- Qwen Max: 30.7 (#292)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1434 | 1288 |
| FrontierCode | 8% | — |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 21.8% |
| SciCode | 40.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.7% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 763.98 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mistral Medium: 28.3 (#90)
- Qwen Max: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 37.7% | — |

## Reasoning

- Mistral Medium: 24.0 (#167)
- Qwen Max: 25.1 (#151)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1426 | 1269 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 50% | — |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| DTBench | 75.5% | — |
| LMCA | 26.1% | — |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 26.9% | — |

## Math

- Mistral Medium: 28.1 (#245)
- Qwen Max: 22.3 (#276)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 32.2% | 16.1% |
| LMArena Math | 1408 | 1275 |
| MATH Level 5 | 81.6% | 67.2% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 0.3% | 1% |
| ProofBench | 9% | — |

## Knowledge

- Mistral Medium: 25.0 (#265)
- Qwen Max: 30.3 (#228)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 59.5% | 56.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1408 | 1248 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 4.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 22.7% | — |

## Multimodal

- Mistral Medium: 35.3 (#88)
- Qwen Max: —

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1172 | — |

## Multilingual

- Mistral Medium: 52.1 (#91)
- Qwen Max: 41.8 (#202)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1408 | 1263 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1447 | 1254 |
| LMArena French | 1459 | 1330 |
| LMArena German | 1432 | 1254 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1378 | 1205 |
| LMArena Korean | 1380 | 1142 |
| LMArena Russian | 1411 | 1274 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1433 | 1290 |

## Instruction Following

- Mistral Medium: 73.7 (#116)
- Qwen Max: 66.5 (#208)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1398 | 1262 |

## Long Context

- Mistral Medium: 42.9 (#114)
- Qwen Max: 39.4 (#180)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1406 | 1288 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 66.7% |

## Writing & Preference

- Mistral Medium: 60.0 (#103)
- Qwen Max: 47.8 (#205)

| Benchmark | Mistral Medium | Qwen Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1424 | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1391 | 1248 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1418 | 1277 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 77.3% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Mistral Medium better than Qwen Max?

Mistral Medium is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.3 to 34.7 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Mistral Medium or Qwen Max?

Qwen Max is cheaper. It lists at $1.60 per million input tokens and $6.40 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium lists at $1.50 and $7.50.

### Is Mistral Medium or Qwen Max better for coding?

Mistral Medium scores higher on coding benchmarks: 34.2 versus 30.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Medium does, with 262K tokens against 33K.

### How many benchmarks do Mistral Medium and Qwen Max share?

21 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mistral Medium has 36 scored results on Noometry and Qwen Max has 23.