Llama 4 (405B) vs Mistral Large 3
Head-to-head technical comparison of intelligence, capabilities, and API pricing.
Which should you use?
Llama 4 (405B) leads on the composite index by 1.3 points (90.5 vs 89.2).
Their Arena Elo differs by only 10 points, inside the confidence intervals the public board reports, so human preference does not separate them.
Only Llama 4 (405B) ships open weights, which decides it outright if the workload has to run on your own hardware.
Pick Llama 4 (405B) when
- Higher composite index — 90.5 against 89.2, a gap of 1.3 points.
- Stronger on MMLU-Pro: 90.5% against 89.2%.
- Open weights, so it is the only one of the two you can run on your own hardware or keep data entirely in-house.
Pick Mistral Large 3 when
On these measures Mistral Large 3 does not lead Llama 4 (405B) anywhere, so pick it only for reasons outside this table — an existing integration, a region, or a contract.
Where these numbers come from
Figures as of 2026-09-14. Arena Elo and pricing are read from the public board and each vendor's own pricing page; see the full leaderboard for all 34 models and which columns are measured rather than estimated, or the benchmark matrix for scores benchmark by benchmark.