Guides / Made in Europe

Best European open language models

Updated November 2026

As of November 2026, the best option is Kolibri-1 by Aleph Alpha, with a Small LM Index of 68.3, followed by Ministral 3 14B (60.0) and Magistral Small 1.2 (55.9).

Models from labs based in Europe, ranked by the Small LM Index.

#	Model	Lab	Small LM Index	Params	Memory (4-bit)	API / 1M	License
1	Kolibri-1	Aleph Alpha	68.3	78.1B (3.5B active)	~49.6 GB	self-host	Apache-2.0
2	Ministral 3 14B	Mistral AI	60.0	14B	~10.6 GB	$0.20	Apache-2.0
3	Magistral Small 1.2	Mistral AI	55.9	24B	~16.9 GB	self-host	Apache-2.0
4	Ministral 3 8B	Mistral AI	55.2	8B	~6.7 GB	$0.15	Apache-2.0
5	Ministral 3 3B	Mistral AI	49.4	3B	~3.3 GB	$0.10	Apache-2.0
6	Mistral Small 3.2	Mistral AI	38.6	24B	~16.9 GB	$0.11	Apache-2.0
7	SmolLM3 3B	Hugging Face (SmolLM)	30.4	3.1B	~3 GB	self-host	Apache-2.0
8	Apertus 1.5 8B	Swiss AI Initiative (Apertus)	20.1	8.9B	~7.2 GB	self-host	Apache-2.0
9	EuroLLM 22B Instruct	EuroLLM (UTTER consortium)	19.2	22.6B	~16.5 GB	self-host	Apache-2.0

Memory covers the weights only; long contexts need more. Scores are mostly lab-reported, so gaps of 1–2 points are noise. See the methodology, or filter the full leaderboard yourself.

Questions

What is the best open LLM made in Europe?

As of November 2026, the best option is Kolibri-1 by Aleph Alpha, with a Small LM Index of 68.3, followed by Ministral 3 14B (60.0) and Magistral Small 1.2 (55.9).

How is this list ranked?

Models from labs based in Europe, ranked by the Small LM Index.

Which of the top five needs the least memory?

Ministral 3 3B, at about 3.3 GB with 4-bit quantization.

Which is the cheapest to use through an API?

Ministral 3 3B, at $0.10 per million tokens from the cheapest provider on OpenRouter.