Compare / Ling-mini-2.0 vs Phi-4
Ling-mini-2.0 vs Phi-4
Updated November 2026
Verdict
Ling-mini-2.0 scores higher on the Small LM Index: 43.0 vs 26.2. On the 7 benchmarks both labs report, Ling-mini-2.0 wins 5 and Phi-4 wins 2. Both need about 11.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Phi-4 has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.070 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.
Pick Ling-mini-2.0 if…
- you want the strongest model overall
- you mostly write code
- you need math and reasoning
- you need precise instruction following
- you build agents that call tools
- you work with long documents
Pick Phi-4 if…
- you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
- you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)
Specifications
| Ling-mini-2.0 | Phi-4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Small LM Index | 43.0 (likely 40–46) | 26.2 (likely 24–29) |
| Lab | InclusionAI (Ling) · China | Microsoft (Phi) · United States |
| Released | 2025-09-09 | 2024-12-12 |
| Parameters | 16.3B (1.4B active, MoE) | 14.7B (dense) |
| Memory at 4-bit | ~11 GB | ~11.4 GB |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 16K tokens |
| Input | text | text |
| Reasoning | No thinking | No thinking |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| API price / 1M tokens | Self-host only | $0.070 ($0.056 in, $0.11 out) |
| Hugging Face downloads (30 days) | 4.6K | 316.7K |
Benchmarks
Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.
| Benchmark | Ling-mini-2.0 | Phi-4 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro Knowledge | 67.1✓ | 71.4✓ |
| GPQA Diamond Knowledge | 56.2✓ | 57.5✓ |
| Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning | 5.1✓ | 3.8✓ |
| AIME Math | 49.3✓ | 14.3✓ |
| LiveCodeBench Coding | 42.9✓ | 23.1✓ |
| τ²-Bench Agentic | 13.2✓ | 0.0✓ |
| IFBench Instruction following | 23.6✓ | 23.5✓ |
| MATH-500 Math | — | 81.0✓ |
| AA-LCR Long context | — | 0.0✓ |
Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.
Questions
Which is better, Ling-mini-2.0 or Phi-4?
Ling-mini-2.0 scores higher on the Small LM Index: 43.0 vs 26.2. On the 7 benchmarks both labs report, Ling-mini-2.0 wins 5 and Phi-4 wins 2.
Which is cheaper to run?
Only Phi-4 has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.070 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 11.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.
Which has the longer context window?
Ling-mini-2.0 has the longer context window: 128K tokens against 16K.
Can I use Ling-mini-2.0 and Phi-4 commercially?
Both are released under the MIT license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.