Together AI vs Mistral AI

Together hosts thirty-plus open models and trains them on one bill. Mistral builds its own open models and sells them direct, via major clouds or to self-host.

By The Subconscious Team · Updated September 30, 2026

Together AI vs Mistral AI: key differences

Together AI is a host and Mistral is a lab, so the question is breadth versus source. Together's catalog runs past thirty open text models, including DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2, Qwen 3.8 and MiniMax M3, with 512K context and a 0.99 second time to first token on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Mistral serves only its own family, capped at 256K: Medium 3.5 at $1.50 in and $7.50 out, Large 3 at $0.50 in and $1.50 out and Small 4 at $0.15 in and $0.60 out. Both halve prices on Batch. Together has no free tier, so evaluation costs money from day one. Mistral's lineup is small and consolidated, and it retires and replaces models quickly.

Training is the sharper split. Together offers LoRA and full-parameter SFT from $0.48 per million training tokens, with reinforcement learning in closed beta and checkpoints that deploy straight to inference. Mistral deprecated its self-serve fine-tuning API and routes custom training through Forge, an enterprise system for pre-training, post-training and RL. Together also sells raw GPU clusters, with H100s from $3.19 an hour reserved, plus dedicated deployments with canary and blue-green rollouts. Mistral counters with distribution and compliance: Azure, Bedrock, Vertex AI, Snowflake Cortex and watsonx listings, EU or US processing regions, and Codestral, OCR and Voxtral alongside its general models.

What Together AI and Mistral AI do

Together AI

Together AI is the broadest open-model platform in the category. One bill covers per-token serverless inference, batch at up to 50% off, provisioned throughput with a 99% SLA, dedicated deployments, raw GPU clusters, managed fine-tuning and code sandboxes for agents. The text catalog runs past thirty open models, including DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2, Qwen 3.8 and MiniMax M3, plus image, video, speech and embedding models. Token prices sit at parity with Fireworks and Baseten.

Example models: Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Pro

Full Together AI profile

Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a Paris lab that sells its models through La Plateforme, its own API, and releases most of them as open weights. It consolidated the lineup in 2026. Mistral Medium 3.5, released April 28, is a dense 128B model that merges instruction following, reasoning and coding into one set of weights, and it replaced both Devstral 2 and the Magistral reasoning models. It costs $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million tokens and scores 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified by Mistral's count. Mistral Small 4, a 119B mixture-of-experts model with 6.5B active, costs $0.15 in and $0.60 out. Mistral Large 3, a 675B MoE under Apache 2.0, runs $0.50 in and $1.50 out. All three carry a 256K context window.

Example models: Mistral Medium 3.5, Mistral Small 4

Full Mistral AI profile

Should you choose Together AI or Mistral AI?

Together AI

Choose Together AI for

Fine-tuning an open model and serving the checkpoint
Switching among thirty-plus open models on one bill
Reserved GPU clusters for large experiments

Mistral AI

Choose Mistral AI for

First-party access to Mistral's own models
EU-region processing and cloud-marketplace billing
Code completion on Codestral

Together AI vs Mistral AI at a glance

Attribute	Together AI	Mistral AI
Model access	Open weights	Open weights, plus closed Codestral
Flagship models	Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2, Qwen 3.8	Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4, Large 3
Speed	0.99s TTFT on DeepSeek V4 Pro	Unknown
Price	Parity with Fireworks and Baseten	$0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M
Customization	LoRA and full SFT; RL in beta	Forge (enterprise); fine-tuning API deprecated
Deployment	Serverless, dedicated, GPU clusters	API, Azure, Bedrock, Vertex, self-host
Long context	512K on DeepSeek V4 Pro	256K

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Together AI and Mistral AI?

Together hosts thirty-plus open models and trains them on one bill. Mistral builds its own open models and sells them direct, via major clouds or to self-host.

When should I choose Together AI over Mistral AI?

Fine-tuning an open model and serving the checkpoint; Switching among thirty-plus open models on one bill; Reserved GPU clusters for large experiments.

When should I choose Mistral AI over Together AI?

First-party access to Mistral's own models; EU-region processing and cloud-marketplace billing; Code completion on Codestral.

Is Together AI or Mistral AI cheaper?

Together AI: Parity with Fireworks and Baseten. Mistral AI: $0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.

Which has more context, Together AI or Mistral AI?

Together AI: 512K on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Mistral AI: 256K.

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