Side-by-side comparison of DBRX Instruct (Databricks · USA) and Phi-4 (Microsoft · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DBRX Instruct is rated conditional; Phi-4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: DBRX Instruct is "Databricks Open", Phi-4 is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional 132B MoE (36B active). Databricks Open Model License is bespoke — allows commercial use with acceptable-use policy and a 700M-MAU-style cap. Read the licence carefully; not Apache 2.0. | EU-ready MIT-licensed 14B from Microsoft Research. Heavy use of synthetic training data is disclosed; English-primary (thin multilingual coverage). Strongest small-model option for permissive-licence EU deployments. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Databricks Open | MIT |
| Commercial use | With caps | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Partial |
| Origin | USA | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 8/100 | 10/100 |
| Speed | — | 29 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.22/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.