Kimi K2.6 vs Mistral Medium 3.5
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Moonshot AI · Apr 2026
Moonshot's multimodal flagship that ties GPT-5.5 on several coding evaluations at a fraction of the price, with open weights.
Mistral AI · Mar 2026
Europe's strongest model line: frontier-adjacent quality at $0.40/$2 with EU data residency and on-prem options.
The verdict
These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. Mistral Medium 3.5 is about 2.1x cheaper per blended million tokens (3:1 input:output mix). Kimi K2.6 also takes 262K of context versus 131K for Mistral Medium 3.5. And Kimi K2.6 is open-weights (Modified MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
Specs & pricing
| Kimi K2.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | — |
| Input price / 1M | $0.95 | $0.4 |
| Output price / 1M | $4 | $2 |
| Context window | 262K | 131K |
| Max output | 262K | — |
| Open weights | yes (Modified MIT) | no |
| Reasoning model | yes | no |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text, image |
| Knowledge cutoff | Feb 2026 | Dec 2025 |
| Released | Apr 2026 | Mar 2026 |
| Example monthly cost* | $15.50 | $7.00 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, Kimi K2.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5?
- These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. Mistral Medium 3.5 is about 2.1x cheaper per blended million tokens (3:1 input:output mix). Kimi K2.6 also takes 262K of context versus 131K for Mistral Medium 3.5. And Kimi K2.6 is open-weights (Modified MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
- Which is cheaper, Kimi K2.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5?
- Kimi K2.6 costs $0.95/$4 per million input/output tokens, while Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $0.4/$2. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $15.50 versus $7.00.
- Which model is better for coding, Kimi K2.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5?
- We don't yet track SWE-bench Verified results for both models; check their individual pages for coding-related scores.