Side-by-side comparison of Llama 3.1 405B (Meta · USA) and Mistral Small (Mistral AI · France) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Llama 3.1 405B is rated conditional; Mistral Small is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Llama 3.1 405B is "Llama community", Mistral Small is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier-class 405B open model. Self-hosting requires serious compute (8×H100 minimum at FP8). Same Llama community licence caveats as the rest of the family. | EU-ready Best-in-class permissive licence from an EU vendor. Apache 2.0 means no usage caps, no royalty, no revocation risk. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Llama community | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | With caps | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Partial |
| Origin | USA | EU |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 17/100 | 13/100 |
| Speed | 31 tok/s | 152 tok/s |
| Blended price | $3.69/M | $0.15/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.