Mistral Medium 3 Instruct vs ShieldGemma 9B
Mistral Medium 3 Instruct (2025) and ShieldGemma 9B (2024) are compact production models from MistralAI and Google DeepMind. Mistral Medium 3 Instruct ships a 128k-token context window, while ShieldGemma 9B ships a 8k-token context window. This comparison covers specs, pricing, API access, capabilities, benchmarks, input and output token costs, and production fit for coding and agent workloads. It focuses on practical selection signals rather than broad model-family marketing.
Mistral Medium 3 Instruct fits 16x more tokens; pick it for long-context work and ShieldGemma 9B for tighter calls.
Decision scorecard
Local evidence first| Signal | Mistral Medium 3 Instruct | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | multimodal apps and provider-routed production | general production evaluation |
| Decision fit | Long context and Vision | Classification |
| Context window | 128k | 8k |
| Cheapest output | $2/1M tokens | - |
| Provider routes | 2 tracked | 1 tracked |
| Shared benchmarks | 0 shared | 0 shared |
Decision tradeoffs
- Mistral Medium 3 Instruct has the larger context window for long prompts, retrieval packs, or transcript analysis.
- Mistral Medium 3 Instruct has broader tracked provider coverage for fallback and route flexibility.
- Mistral Medium 3 Instruct uniquely exposes Vision and Multimodal in local model data.
- Local decision data tags Mistral Medium 3 Instruct for Long context and Vision.
- Local decision data tags ShieldGemma 9B for Classification.
Monthly cost at traffic
Estimate token spend from the cheapest tracked input and output route or tier on this page.
Mistral Medium 3 Instruct
$820
Cheapest tracked route/tier: Mistral AI Studio
ShieldGemma 9B
Unavailable
No complete token price in local provider data
Cost delta unavailable until both models have sourced input and output token prices.
Switch friction
- Provider overlap exists on NVIDIA NIM; start route-level A/B tests there.
- Check replacement coverage for Vision and Multimodal before moving production traffic.
- Provider overlap exists on NVIDIA NIM; start route-level A/B tests there.
- Mistral Medium 3 Instruct adds Vision and Multimodal in local capability data.
Specs
| Specification | ||
|---|---|---|
| Released | 2025-10-01 | 2024-07-01 |
| Context window | 128k | 8k |
| Parameters | — | 9B |
| Architecture | Decoder Only | Decoder Only |
| License | Proprietary | Gemma |
| Openness | Proprietary | Open weights |
| Weights | Not released | Unknown |
| Code | Unknown | Unknown |
| Commercial use | Commercial use: conditional | Commercial use: conditional |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-03 | - |
Pricing and availability
| Pricing attribute | Mistral Medium 3 Instruct | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.40/1M tokens | - |
| Output price | $2/1M tokens | - |
| Providers |
Capabilities
| Capability | Mistral Medium 3 Instruct | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Vision | Yes | No |
| Multimodal | Yes | No |
| Reasoning | No | No |
| JSON / Tool use | No | No |
| Structured outputs | No | No |
| Code execution | No | No |
| IDE integration | No | No |
| Computer use | No | No |
| Parallel agents | No | No |
Benchmarks
No shared benchmark scores are currently available for this pair.
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Last reviewed: 2026-06-15. Data sourced from public model cards and provider documentation.