Best Small Language Models for Microsoft Foundry Models

Compare the Top Small Language Models that integrate with Microsoft Foundry Models as of September 2026

This a list of Small Language Models that integrate with Microsoft Foundry Models. Use the filters on the left to add additional filters for products that have integrations with Microsoft Foundry Models. View the products that work with Microsoft Foundry Models in the table below.

What are Small Language Models for Microsoft Foundry Models?

Small Language Models (SLMs) are compact AI models designed to perform natural language understanding and generation tasks while requiring significantly fewer computational resources than large language models (LLMs). These models are optimized for low latency, lower memory usage, on-device inference, and cost-efficient deployment, making them well suited for edge devices, mobile applications, embedded systems, and enterprise workloads with strict performance or privacy requirements. SLMs can power applications such as chatbots, document summarization, code generation, classification, translation, question answering, and AI agents while delivering fast inference and reduced infrastructure costs. Many small language models are available as open-source or commercial offerings and integrate with AI frameworks, inference engines, cloud platforms, and developer tools for flexible deployment. By balancing performance, efficiency, and scalability, small language models help organizations build responsive, cost-effective AI applications across a wide range of environments. Compare and read user reviews of the best Small Language Models for Microsoft Foundry Models currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Mistral AI

    Mistral AI

    Mistral AI

    Mistral AI is a pioneering artificial intelligence startup specializing in open-source generative AI. The company offers a range of customizable, enterprise-grade AI solutions deployable across various platforms, including on-premises, cloud, edge, and devices. Flagship products include "Le Chat," a multilingual AI assistant designed to enhance productivity in both personal and professional contexts, and "La Plateforme," a developer platform that enables the creation and deployment of AI-powered applications. Committed to transparency and innovation, Mistral AI positions itself as a leading independent AI lab, contributing significantly to open-source AI and policy development.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 2
    Mistral NeMo

    Mistral NeMo

    Mistral AI

    Mistral NeMo, our new best small model. A state-of-the-art 12B model with 128k context length, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral NeMo is a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category. As it relies on standard architecture, Mistral NeMo is easy to use and a drop-in replacement in any system using Mistral 7B. We have released pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license to promote adoption for researchers and enterprises. Mistral NeMo was trained with quantization awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss. The model is designed for global, multilingual applications. It is trained on function calling and has a large context window. Compared to Mistral 7B, it is much better at following precise instructions, reasoning, and handling multi-turn conversations.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    GPT-5 mini
    GPT-5 mini is a streamlined, faster, and more affordable variant of OpenAI’s GPT-5, optimized for well-defined tasks and precise prompts. It supports text and image inputs and delivers high-quality text outputs with a 400,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. This model excels at rapid response times, making it suitable for applications requiring fast, accurate language understanding without the full overhead of GPT-5. Pricing is cost-effective, with input tokens at $0.25 per million and output tokens at $2 per million, providing savings over the flagship model. GPT-5 mini supports advanced features like streaming, function calling, structured outputs, and fine-tuning, but does not support audio input or image generation. It integrates well with various API endpoints including chat completions, responses, and embeddings, making it versatile for many AI-powered tasks.
    Starting Price: $0.25 per 1M tokens
  • 4
    Llama 2
    The next generation of our open source large language model. This release includes model weights and starting code for pretrained and fine-tuned Llama language models — ranging from 7B to 70B parameters. Llama 2 pretrained models are trained on 2 trillion tokens, and have double the context length than Llama 1. Its fine-tuned models have been trained on over 1 million human annotations. Llama 2 outperforms other open source language models on many external benchmarks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. Llama 2 was pretrained on publicly available online data sources. The fine-tuned model, Llama-2-chat, leverages publicly available instruction datasets and over 1 million human annotations. We have a broad range of supporters around the world who believe in our open approach to today’s AI — companies that have given early feedback and are excited to build with Llama 2.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    Grok 3 mini

    Grok 3 mini

    SpaceXAI

    Grok-3 Mini, crafted by xAI, is an agile and insightful AI companion tailored for users who need quick, yet thorough answers to their questions. This smaller version maintains the essence of the Grok series, offering an external, often humorous perspective on human affairs with a focus on efficiency. Designed for those on the move or with limited resources, Grok-3 Mini delivers the same level of curiosity and helpfulness in a more compact form. It's adept at handling a broad spectrum of questions, providing succinct insights without compromising on depth or accuracy, making it a perfect tool for fast-paced, modern-day inquiries.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 6
    Phi-4

    Phi-4

    Microsoft

    Phi-4 is a 14B parameter state-of-the-art small language model (SLM) that excels at complex reasoning in areas such as math, in addition to conventional language processing. Phi-4 is the latest member of our Phi family of small language models and demonstrates what’s possible as we continue to probe the boundaries of SLMs. Phi-4 is currently available on Azure AI Foundry under a Microsoft Research License Agreement (MSRLA) and will be available on Hugging Face. Phi-4 outperforms comparable and larger models on math related reasoning due to advancements throughout the processes, including the use of high-quality synthetic datasets, curation of high-quality organic data, and post-training innovations. Phi-4 continues to push the frontier of size vs quality.
  • 7
    Phi-4-reasoning
    Phi-4-reasoning is a 14-billion parameter transformer-based language model optimized for complex reasoning tasks, including math, coding, algorithmic problem solving, and planning. Trained via supervised fine-tuning of Phi-4 on carefully curated "teachable" prompts and reasoning demonstrations generated using o3-mini, it generates detailed reasoning chains that effectively leverage inference-time compute. Phi-4-reasoning incorporates outcome-based reinforcement learning to produce longer reasoning traces. It outperforms significantly larger open-weight models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B and approaches the performance levels of the full DeepSeek-R1 model across a wide range of reasoning tasks. Phi-4-reasoning is designed for environments with constrained computing or latency. Fine-tuned with synthetic data generated by DeepSeek-R1, it provides high-quality, step-by-step problem solving.
  • 8
    Phi-4-mini-reasoning
    Phi-4-mini-reasoning is a 3.8-billion parameter transformer-based language model optimized for mathematical reasoning and step-by-step problem solving in environments with constrained computing or latency. Fine-tuned with synthetic data generated by the DeepSeek-R1 model, it balances efficiency with advanced reasoning ability. Trained on over one million diverse math problems spanning multiple levels of difficulty from middle school to Ph.D. level, Phi-4-mini-reasoning outperforms its base model on long sentence generation across various evaluations and surpasses larger models like OpenThinker-7B, Llama-3.2-3B-instruct, and DeepSeek-R1. It features a 128K-token context window and supports function calling, enabling integration with external tools and APIs. Phi-4-mini-reasoning can be quantized using Microsoft Olive or Apple MLX Framework for deployment on edge devices such as IoT, laptops, and mobile devices.
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