Side-by-side comparison of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta Platforms · United States) and Mistral Small 4 (Mistral AI · France) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is rated conditional; Mistral Small 4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is "Llama 3.1 Community Licence", Mistral Small 4 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 Unified model folding Instruct, reasoning (Magistral) and code (Devstral) into a single 119B MoE under Apache 2.0. 6.5B active params, 256K context, 24 languages, toggleable reasoning effort. Strongest permissive EU option at this scale. |
| 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 | Undisclosed |
| Origin | United States | EU |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 12/100 | 19/100 |
| Speed | 160 tok/s | 147 tok/s |
| Blended price | $0.10/M | $0.26/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.