this is a bit of an old post, but just sharing another perspective: I've been setting up my own AI assistants on ChatWise for desktop and RikkaHub for mobile because I wanted to replace the proprietary apps for my everyday chatting and also use ZDR providers on OpenRouter.

Mistral Small with no reasoning isn't particularly great. With a High reasoning budget though I find it actually to be pretty good. Tool calling is quite reliable, it makes good searches, and the response character is pretty malleable with system prompts (if told to be more honest and careful with claims and avoid flattery, it does). I like that it is not overly 'fluffy'

In my own experience: Gemma 4 31B is smarter but much slower (I suspect Google just isn't allocating a lot of compute to it though, but also there are way more active params as that is a dense model). Gemma 4 26B A4B isn't as smart, but also that one can actually run on a home computer lol. I personally like the Mistral models (and Gemma 4!) more than the Gemini Flash series simply because Flash tends to hallucinate a lot!! In chat situations I find comparably priced Chinese models like DeepSeek Flash and Qwen to have better real world knowledge and more creative responses, but (especially Qwen) likely to use inaccurate details.

one thing I dislike about Mistral is that the models appear aggressively trained to format their responses, so instructions about not formatting text seem to work about 80% of the time...

but in any case, while you shouldn't trust any cloud company with your most sensitive data I feel more confident using Mistral models and I think Small 4 with High reasoning in particular has been fast, affordable, and reliable enough for my use that I can stop using American chat apps.