Side-by-side comparison of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta Platforms · United States) and Mistral Small (Mistral AI · France) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is rated conditional; Mistral Small is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is "Llama 3.1 Community Licence", Mistral Small is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Per current documentation, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is released under the Llama 3.1 Community Licence — a custom source-available licence rather than OSI open source. Commercial deployment is permitted below 700M MAU subject to the Acceptable Use Policy and attribution rules, but training-data opacity and US origin create EU AI Act transparency and data-transfer gaps that deployers should document. | 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 | 2026-04-17 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Llama 3.1 Community Licence | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Restricted (MAU cap + AUP) | Yes |
| Training data | Token count only | Partial |
| Origin | United States | EU |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 12/100 | 13/100 |
| Speed | 160 tok/s | 152 tok/s |
| Blended price | $0.10/M | $0.15/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.