The closest alternative to Phi 4 Mini Instruct is Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct — comparable intelligence (8.7 vs 8.4); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.080/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct is the closest alternative to Phi 4 Mini Instruct, with an Intelligence Index of 8.7 (Phi 4 Mini Instruct scores 8.4) at $0.345 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.080 for Phi 4 Mini Instruct, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Phi 4 Mini Instruct — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.