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Mistral Small 3.1 24B vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct

We don't benchmark Mistral Small 3.1 24B or Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct on Vision Evals. Both are open-weight under Apache 2.0, so either is free for commercial use. Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is cheaper per token ($0.15/M vs $0.35/M input). Test them side by side on your own images below.

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MistralMistral Small 3.1 24B
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QwenQwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct
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Mistral Small 3.1 24B vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct Comparison Table

Pricing updated November 10, 2026

PropertyMistral Small 3.1 24BQwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct
OrganizationMistralQwen
Categoryopenopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateMar 2025Oct 2025
Context Window128K262K
Parameters24B31B
LicenseApache 2.0Apache 2.0
Commercial usefree for commercial usefree for commercial use
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.351$0.150
Output $/1M$0.555$0.600
Vision Tasks
Object DetectionNot listedSupported
Both support 9 more tasks
Model Features
Both support 3 more features

Mistral Small 3.1 24B vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct: Overview

Mistral Small 3.1 24B

Mistral Small 3.1 24B, released on March 17, 2025, is an open-weight multimodal model from Mistral AI, distributed under the Apache-2.0 license. With around 24B parameters and a 128K token context window, it is available in both base and instruction-tuned (“Instruct”) variants. The model introduces vision support alongside text, enabling tasks like multimodal reasoning, captioning, and image-based Q&A.

It is multilingual, supporting many languages, and is optimized for fast responses, function calling, structured dialogue, and long-context reasoning. Despite its size, the model can be run locally in quantized formats, fitting on machines with ~32GB RAM, making it accessible to developers outside large cloud setups. However, the output length is smaller than the 128K input window, meaning long generations may require chaining. In addition, using full vision features or the maximum context window significantly increases compute costs, and performance on highly complex reasoning or enterprise-scale tasks still trails larger proprietary frontier models.

Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct

Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal large language model developed by Alibaba as part of the Qwen family, built for instruction-following tasks that unify text generation with visual and video understanding. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets efficient, high-fidelity vision-language reasoning across very long contexts.

The model accepts text and image inputs and produces text outputs, with strong performance in OCR, spatial reasoning, long-video understanding, and agentic or GUI-centric visual tasks. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (A3B) design with ~31.1B total parameters and ~3B active per token, paired with Qwen3-VL’s unified multimodal stack (including Interleaved-MRoPE and DeepStack fusion) to process text, images, and video in a single architecture. OCR support expands to 32 languages, enhancing document workflows. With a native ~262K token context window (extendable further), it stands out today for its balance of scale, efficiency, long-context support, and open accessibility in multimodal systems.