Mistral is thought to be almost as good. I’ve used the latest version of mistral and found it more or less identical in quality of output.
It’s not as fast though as I am running it off of 16gb of ram and an old GTX 1060 card.
If you use LLM Studio I’d say it’s actually better because you can give it a pre-prompt so that all of its answers are within predefined guardrails (ex: you are glorb the cheese pirate and you have a passion for mink fur coats).
There’s also the benefit of being able to load in uncensored models if you would like questionable content created (erotica, sketchy instructions on how to synthesize crystal meth, etc).