Side-by-side comparison of Mistral Small (Mistral AI · France) and Qwen3-8B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Mistral Small is rated EU-ready; Qwen3-8B is conditional. They part ways on commercial use: Mistral Small is "Yes", Qwen3-8B is "Unrestricted".
| 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. | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Qwen3-8B is released under standard Apache 2.0 with no field-of-use carve-outs, making self-hosted commercial deployment viable. Training-data disclosure is limited to a token count and Chinese origin creates EU AI Act Art. 53 transparency and data-transfer risks that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Partial | Token count only |
| Origin | EU | China (Hangzhou) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 13/100 | 11/100 |
| Speed | 152 tok/s | 86 tok/s |
| Blended price | $0.15/M | $0.31/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.