Side-by-side comparison of Mistral Small (Mistral AI · France) and Phi-4 (Microsoft · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Mistral Small is rated EU-ready; Phi-4 is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Mistral Small is "Apache 2.0", Phi-4 is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | EU-ready Best-in-class permissive licence from an EU vendor. Apache 2.0 means no usage caps, no royalty, no revocation risk. | 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 | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Training data | Partial | Partial |
| Origin | EU | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 13/100 | 10/100 |
| Speed | 152 tok/s | 29 tok/s |
| Blended price | $0.15/M | $0.22/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.