This is a comparison that keeps coming up in engineering teams debating their code-generation stack: one model with a license restriction and two with clear commercial paths at different size points. Codestral 22B is Mistral AI's first coding specialist, released May 2024 with 22 billion parameters, 80-plus language support, and a 32K context window. Benchmark-wise it holds its own against same-era 7B coding models and competes with DeepSeek Coder V2 Lite. The problem is the Mistral Research License, which explicitly blocks commercial production use without a direct Mistral agreement. If you need to ship to end users, that license is a blocker — not a footnote. Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B Instruct, released November 2024, brings 7 billion parameters with a 131K context window — significantly more context depth than Codestral at a smaller parameter count. HumanEval performance is competitive with DeepSeek Coder 6.7B and StarCoder2 7B. Hosted pricing across providers typically runs below $0.20 per million tokens, which makes high-frequency tab-completion-at-scale economically viable. The Qwen license permits commercial deployment; review its commercial terms before going live. Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct extends the same architecture to 32 billion parameters, adding meaningful headroom on LiveCodeBench and MultiPL-E benchmarks, and retaining the 131K context window. It handles longer codebases, more complex refactoring tasks, and agentic pipelines that the 7B struggles with. Hosting cost is proportionally higher, but remains below frontier-model pricing for comparable code tasks. Pick Codestral 22B only if your workload is non-commercial and the research license fits cleanly. Pick Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B for latency-sensitive IDE autocomplete at scale. Pick Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B for CI pipelines, multi-file refactoring, and agent loops that need deeper reasoning than the 7B can provide.