A balanced model in the Ministral 3 family, Ministral 3 8B is a powerful, efficient tiny language model with vision capabilities.
Model details →Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 wins on 2 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
The Qwen3.5 series 397B-A17B native vision-language model is built on a hybrid architecture that integrates a linear attention mechanism with a sparse mixture-of-experts model, achieving higher inference efficiency. It delivers state-of-the…
Model details →Side-by-side comparison
| Capability | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 | Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context window Maximum number of input tokens the model can attend to in a single request. | 262K | 262K | Tie |
| Input price (per 1M) Cost per million input tokens billed by the provider. | $0.15 | $0.39 | 🏆 Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 |
| Output price (per 1M) Cost per million output tokens billed by the provider. | $0.15 | $2.34 | 🏆 Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 |
| Tool / function calling First-class support for emitting structured tool calls. | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Vision input Accepts image inputs alongside text. | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Reasoning mode Internal chain-of-thought / extended-thinking support. | — | Yes | 🏆 Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 better than Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B?
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 wins on 2 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
What's the price difference between Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 and Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B?
Input: $0.15 vs $0.39 per 1M tokens. Output: $0.15 vs $2.34 per 1M tokens.
What context windows do Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 and Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B support?
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 supports up to 262K tokens. Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B supports up to 262K tokens.
Do both Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 and Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B support tool calling?
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512: yes. Qwen: Qwen3.5 397B A17B: yes.