Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 is the pick when you need to fit long inputs in one request, Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Aion Labs | Mistral AI |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $3.00 | $2.00 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $6.00 | $6.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $3.75 | $3.00 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 17% | 20% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 66K tokens (~98 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 47% | 11% |
| Max output per response | 33K tokens (~24,600 words) | 52K tokens (~39,300 words) |
| Input types | text | text, file |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-23 | 2024-04-17 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $345 | $270 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $75.00 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $420 | $300 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $120 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $432 | Doesn't fit context | — |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $276 | $196 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $80.00 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $156 | Doesn't fit context | — |
| Capability | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | — | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | — | — | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | — | ✓ Yes | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 is the pick when you need to fit long inputs in one request, Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct when cost matters at scale. In short: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 when you need to fit long inputs in one request, you need reasoning / thinking mode, you want the newer model; Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct when cost matters at scale, you need file / PDF input, you need seed (reproducible sampling), you generate long outputs in one go.
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is cheaper: $3.00 vs $3.75 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 20% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $270 against $345.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens; Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct costs $2.00 input and $6.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5: 262K tokens, about 393 pages, against 66K (about 98 pages) for Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct.
Tool calling — AionLabs: Aion 3.5: yes, Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes. JSON-schema structured output — AionLabs: Aion 3.5: yes, Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes.
Neither accepts image input — both are text-in models.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 can write up to 33K tokens (about 24,600 words) per response; Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct up to 52K (about 39,300 words).
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 was listed on 2026-09-23; Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct on 2024-04-17.
Aion 3.5 is a multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system from AionLabs, built on the GLM family of models. It uses a collaborative generation process in which multiple specialized models each...
Full AionLabs: Aion 3.5 specs →Mistral's official instruct fine-tuned version of [Mixtral 8x22B](/models/mistralai/mixtral-8x22b). It uses 39B active parameters out of 141B, offering unparalleled cost efficiency for its size. Its strengths include: - strong math, coding,...
Full Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct specs →