Mistral Large 2 vs GPT-5 Nano: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between Mistral Large 2 (Mistral AI) and GPT-5 Nano (OpenAI) comes down to three things: per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload. Mistral Large 2 costs $2.00/M input vs $0.05/M for GPT-5 Nano; context windows are 128K vs 400K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.

Side-by-side specs

SpecMistral Large 2GPT-5 Nano
ProviderMistral AIOpenAI
Released2024-07-242025-08-07
Input price $2.00/M $0.05/M
Output price $6.00/M $0.40/M
Cached input $0.0050/M
Context window 128K 400K
Max output 8K 64K
Modalities text text
Tokenizer mistral o200k_base

Capability matrix

CapabilityMistral Large 2GPT-5 Nano
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
streaming Yes Yes

Benchmark comparison

Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.

BenchmarkCategoryMistral Large 2GPT-5 NanoΔ
MMLU general 84.0
HumanEval coding 92.0

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)Mistral Large 2GPT-5 NanoCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.005000 $0.000250 GPT-5 Nano by $0.004750
RAG (4K / 500) $0.011000 $0.000400 GPT-5 Nano by $0.010600
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.046000 $0.001400 GPT-5 Nano by $0.044600
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.209000 $0.005600 GPT-5 Nano by $0.203400

When to choose Mistral Large 2 over GPT-5 Nano

  • Mistral Large 2 fits when your stack is already on Mistral AI (single billing, SDK, observability surface).

When to choose GPT-5 Nano over Mistral Large 2

  • Per-token input cost is 98% lower than Mistral Large 2.
  • Larger context window (400K vs 128K).

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