Llama 3 vs Mistral: Which Open Source LLM Is Best in 2025?

The open-source LLM landscape has evolved dramatically in 2025. Two models dominate for self-hosted use: Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral AI’s Mistral family. Both are powerful, free to download, and run on consumer hardware — but they make different tradeoffs. Here’s a definitive comparison.

Llama 3: Meta’s Flagship Open Model

Llama 3 comes in 8B, 70B, and 405B parameter variants. The 8B model runs on consumer GPUs with 8GB VRAM; the 70B requires a high-end workstation. For teams interested in running LLMs locally with Ollama, Llama 3 is one of the best-supported models — available as a single pull command and runs well on Apple Silicon Macs.

Mistral: European Excellence

Mistral AI’s models — Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B (Mixture of Experts), and Mistral Large — are known for punching above their weight. Mistral 7B is widely regarded as the best 7B model available. Mixtral 8x7B matches or beats Llama 3 70B on many benchmarks at a fraction of the computational cost, and is available on Hugging Face.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Factor	Llama 3 70B	Mixtral 8x7B
MMLU Score	82.0%	71.9%
HumanEval (code)	81.1%	59.1%
VRAM Required	40GB+	24GB+
License	Llama Community	Apache 2.0
Context Window	8K tokens	32K tokens

When to Choose Each

Choose Llama 3 when coding performance is critical or you need the largest possible model (405B). Choose Mistral when you need longer context windows, Apache 2.0 licensing (fully permissive for commercial use), or the best performance-per-compute ratio. See our full list of top open source LLMs for more alternatives.

Fine-Tuning Considerations

Both models are excellent bases for fine-tuning on custom datasets. Mistral’s Apache 2.0 license makes it more legally straightforward for proprietary fine-tuned models. The AI research breakthroughs of 2024-2025 have elevated open-source model quality dramatically.