Best local LLM for French
Last updated 2026-05-26 · Page updated 2026-07-13
Top 8 open-source picks for French language tasks, ranked by benchmark performance and real-world fit. Updated monthly.
Mistral Small 3.1 24B
Mistral AI's Small 3.1 — Small 3 plus a vision encoder, a 128k context, and ~150 tok/s inference under Apache 2.0. Small 3.2 (June 2025) is a drop-in upgrade.
Mistral Small 3.2 24B
Mistral AI's June 2025 refresh of Small 3.1: a 24B Apache 2.0 dense model with vision input, sharper function calling, and roughly half the rate of runaway generations seen in 3.1.
Magistral Small 24B
Mistral AI's first open reasoning model, built on Small 3.1 with RL-trained chain-of-thought. Hits 70.7% on AIME24 under Apache 2.0.
Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct
Mistral AI and NVIDIA's co-developed 12B instruct model with 128k context, the Tekken tokenizer, and strong European multilingual coverage.
Lucie 7B
A French-sovereign 7B model from OpenLLM-France, backed by CNRS and LINAGORA, with a fully transparent and auditable training corpus.
Mistral Small 3
Mistral AI's 24B dense model that closes most of the gap with 70B-class models. Best quality-per-parameter we've measured at this size in 2025.
Voxtral-4B-TTS
Mistral AI's open frontier TTS model covering 9 languages including French, rivaling ElevenLabs on quality. Note: CC-BY-NC 4.0, non-commercial only.
EuroLLM 22B Instruct 2512
Utter Project's 22.6B EU-sovereign model released February 2026 covering 35 European languages with 32k context — the heavy-duty successor to EuroLLM 9B.
Which GPU should you buy to run Mistral Small 3.1 24B?
To run Mistral Small 3.1 24B locally at Q4, you need ~14 GB of VRAM. The best value for this is a RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB VRAM).
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best local LLM for French language tasks?
Mistral Small 3.1 24B tops this ranking — a 24B model, licensed under Apache 2.0, needing about 14 GB of VRAM at Q4 quantization. See the full list below for the runner-ups and how they compare.
How much VRAM do I need to run Mistral Small 3.1 24B?
At Q4 quantization, Mistral Small 3.1 24B needs about 14 GB of VRAM and fits comfortably on a single 24 GB GPU.
Which of these models fit an 8 GB GPU?
At Q4 quantization, Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct, Lucie 7B fit within 8 GB of VRAM.
Are the models on this French language tasks list free for commercial use?
Licenses across this list include Apache 2.0, CC-BY-NC 4.0. Check the specific license of each model on its catalog page before deploying commercially, as terms vary by author.
What context window do these models support?
Context windows on this list range from 4k to 125k tokens, depending on the model.