Mistral OCR 4 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Mistral OCR 4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (90 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at coding (78 vs 5).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Mistral OCR 4 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Mistral OCR 4 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | Not announced | ✓128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | 4000 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | 4000 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Mistral OCR 4 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OlmOCRBench | 85.20 | - |
| OmniDocBench | 93.07 | - |
| Human preference (head-to-head) | 72% win rate | - |
| Human evaluation (blind) | 72% | - |
| Human Evaluation (Blind Test) | 72% win rate | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Mistral OCR 4 if...
- →You need to convert PDFs, scans, or office docs into structured text/Markdown
- →You require high-accuracy multilingual document parsing at low cost
- →You need tables, equations, and layout preserved with confidence scores
- →You must keep documents in-house (self-hosted deployment)
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters