Devstral 2 2512 vs Grok 4

Across our 12-test suite, Grok 4 wins 5 benchmarks, Devstral 2 2512 wins 4, and 3 are tied.

Where Grok 4 leads:

• Strategic analysis: Grok 4 scores 5/5 (tied for 1st among 54 models with 25 others) vs Devstral 2 2512's 4/5 (rank 27 of 54). For nuanced tradeoff reasoning with real numbers, Grok 4 is the stronger pick.
• Faithfulness: Grok 4 scores 5/5 (tied for 1st among 55 models with 32 others) vs Devstral 2 2512's 4/5 (rank 34 of 55). If staying tightly grounded in source material matters — summarization, document Q&A — Grok 4 hallucinates less in our tests.
• Classification: Grok 4 scores 4/5 (tied for 1st among 53 models with 29 others) vs Devstral 2 2512's 3/5 (rank 31 of 53). A full point gap here matters for routing and categorization tasks.
• Safety calibration: Grok 4 scores 2/5 (rank 12 of 55) vs Devstral 2 2512's 1/5 (rank 32 of 55). Both are below the median (p50 = 2), but Devstral 2 2512's score of 1 places it in the bottom tier on this dimension.
• Persona consistency: Grok 4 scores 5/5 (tied for 1st among 53 models with 36 others) vs Devstral 2 2512's 4/5 (rank 38 of 53). Relevant for chatbot or role-playing applications requiring stable character.

Where Devstral 2 2512 leads:

• Structured output: Devstral 2 2512 scores 5/5 (tied for 1st among 54 models with 24 others) vs Grok 4's 4/5 (rank 26 of 54). More reliable JSON schema compliance in our tests — important for any pipeline parsing model output programmatically.
• Constrained rewriting: Devstral 2 2512 scores 5/5 (tied for 1st among 53 models with 4 others) vs Grok 4's 4/5 (rank 6 of 53). Devstral 2 2512 is among the very best at compressing content within hard character limits.
• Creative problem solving: Devstral 2 2512 scores 4/5 (rank 9 of 54 with 20 others) vs Grok 4's 3/5 (rank 30 of 54). A meaningful gap for brainstorming and generating non-obvious ideas.
• Agentic planning: Devstral 2 2512 scores 4/5 (rank 16 of 54 with 25 others) vs Grok 4's 3/5 (rank 42 of 54). This is the most practically significant gap. Grok 4 ranks near the bottom third of tested models on goal decomposition and failure recovery — a serious limitation for autonomous coding agents.

Ties (both score equally):

• Tool calling: Both score 4/5 (rank 18 of 54, 29 models share this score). Equivalent on function selection and argument accuracy.
• Long context: Both score 5/5 (tied for 1st among 55 models with 36 others). Both handle 30K+ token retrieval well.
• Multilingual: Both score 5/5 (tied for 1st among 55 models with 34 others). Equivalent non-English quality.

Devstral 2 2512 costs $0.40/M input and $2/M output tokens. Grok 4 costs $3/M input and $15/M output tokens — 7.5x more expensive on input and 7.5x more on output. In practice: at 1M output tokens/month, you pay $2 vs $15. At 10M tokens/month, that's $20 vs $150. At 100M tokens/month, the gap becomes $200 vs $1,500 — a $1,300/month difference on output alone. Grok 4 also uses reasoning tokens (flagged in the payload), which can inflate actual token consumption beyond what prompt length suggests, pushing real-world costs even higher. Developers running agentic pipelines with high tool-call volumes will feel this most acutely. The cost difference only makes sense to absorb if Grok 4's advantages in strategic analysis, faithfulness, and persona consistency are directly load-bearing for your application.

Choose Devstral 2 2512 if you are building agentic coding pipelines, need reliable structured JSON output, or are running high token volumes where cost matters. Its 4/5 on agentic planning (vs Grok 4's 3/5 ranking 42nd of 54), 5/5 on structured output, and $2/M output cost make it the clear pick for coding automation, CI/CD integration, and any workflow that processes model output programmatically. Also choose it if budget is a hard constraint — at 100M tokens/month, it saves roughly $1,300 on output alone.

Choose Grok 4 if your application centers on strategic analysis, document faithfulness, classification and routing, or maintaining consistent AI personas. Its 5/5 on strategic analysis (tied for 1st), 5/5 on faithfulness, and 4/5 on classification outperform Devstral 2 2512 on those dimensions. Grok 4 also supports image and file inputs (text+image+file->text modality) — a capability not present in Devstral 2 2512's text->text modality — making it the only option when multimodal input is required. Be aware that Grok 4 uses reasoning tokens, which can inflate costs beyond base pricing.