Ministral 8B Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking
Comparing Ministral 8B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Mistral AI · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Ministral 8B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
On price, Ministral 8B Instruct is roughly 4.9x cheaper per token on a blended 3:1 input/output basis, which adds up quickly at production volume.
Ministral 8B Instruct also accepts a larger context window (128,000 input tokens), making it the stronger choice for long documents and large codebases.
Based on current benchmark, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Ministral 8B Instruct
- cost matters — it's about 4.9x cheaper per token
- you process long inputs — it offers a 128,000 token context window
Choose Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2025
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Performance Benchmarks
Comparative analysis across standard metrics
Ministral 8B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinkingdon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.
Arena Performance
Playground indexes and blind preference scores
Pricing Analysis
Price comparison per million tokens
For input processing, Ministral 8B Instruct ($0.10/1M tokens) is 1.5x cheaper than Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking ($0.15/1M tokens).
For output processing, Ministral 8B Instruct ($0.10/1M tokens) is 15.0x cheaper than Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking ($1.50/1M tokens).
In conclusion, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking is more expensive than Ministral 8B Instruct.*
* Using a 3:1 ratio of input to output tokens
Model Size
Parameter count comparison
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking has 72.0B more parameters than Ministral 8B Instruct, making it 897.5% larger.
Context Window
Maximum input and output token capacity
Ministral 8B Instruct accepts 128,000 input tokens compared to Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking's 65,536 tokens. Ministral 8B Instruct can generate longer responses up to 128,000 tokens, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking is limited to 65,536 tokens.
License
Usage and distribution terms
Ministral 8B Instruct is licensed under Mistral Research License, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking uses Apache 2.0.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
Mistral Research License
Open weights
Apache 2.0
Open weights
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
Ministral 8B Instruct was released on 2024-10-16, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking was released on 2025-09-10.
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking is 11 months newer than Ministral 8B Instruct.
Oct 16, 2024
1.9 years ago
Sep 10, 2025
11 months ago
10mo newerKnowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Provider Availability
Ministral 8B Instruct is available from Mistral AI. Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking is available from Novita.
Ministral 8B Instruct
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Ministral 8B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Ministral 8B Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking.