Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Ministral 3B

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 26.2 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 100× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 5 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

Ministral 3B Mistral AI

26.2

Rank #338 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 5 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in 3 categories and Ministral 3B in 0 categories; 3 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 61.9 to 10.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 90.5% for Claude Opus 4.6 and 25.3% for Ministral 3B.
  • Ministral 3B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.10 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 131K.
  • Ministral 3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.6 and Ministral 3B specifications
Claude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index58.226.2
Released2026-02-042024-10-01
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window1M131K
Max output128K262K
Input $ / M tokens$5$0.10
Output $ / M tokens$25$0.10
Results tracked686

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), Ministral 3B: —

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
SWE-bench Verified78.7%—
FrontierCode26.6%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)75.6%—
LMArena WebDev1547—
SWE-bench Multilingual72%—
GSO41.2%—
WeirdML78%—
LMArena Coding1536—
ALE-Bench996.5—
AlgoTune1.47—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), Ministral 3B: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
Terminal-Bench79.8%—
APEX-Agents46.3%—
Remote Labor Index4.2%—
τ²-bench Banking27.3%—
Cybench93%—
DeepResearch Bench55.3%—
GBAEval44.1%—
LMArena Search1253—
METR Time Horizons78.9%—
Vending-Bench 28,018—

Reasoning Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23), Ministral 3B: 18.4 (#282)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
DTBench91.2%51.7%
LMCA55.8%5.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index155.24118.1
ARC-AGI-269.2%—
SimpleBench67.6%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark83.6%—
NYT Connections (extended)92.1%—
ARC-AGI-194%—
Chess Puzzles17%—
EnigmaEval7.6%—
Thematic Generalization80.6%—
EBR-Bench12.7%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1527—
Mystery Game Puzzles25%—
ForecastBench60—

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), Ministral 3B: 26.6 (#258)

Knowledge Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26), Ministral 3B: 10.4 (#302)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
GPQA Diamond90.5%25.3%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.2%7.3%
Humanity's Last Exam34.4%—
SimpleQA Verified47%—
LMArena Expert1546—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), Ministral 3B: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Vision1316—
Furniture Assembly28.3%—
LMArena Document1507—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), Ministral 3B: —

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Non-English1489—
LMArena Chinese1551—
LMArena French1513—
LMArena German1502—
LMArena Japanese1484—
LMArena Korean1464—
LMArena Russian1497—
LMArena Spanish1510—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), Ministral 3B: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Instruction Following1523—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), Ministral 3B: —

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
CL-bench20.7%—
CL-bench Life17%—
LMArena Longer Query1520—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), Ministral 3B: —

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Text1503—
LMArena Creative Writing1505—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1809—
EQ-Bench 41223—
LMArena Multi-Turn1513—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Ministral 3B?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 26.2 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 100× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Ministral 3B?

Ministral 3B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 131K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Ministral 3B share?

5 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 3B has 6.

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