Noometry

Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Mistral Small

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 38× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 25 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

Mistral Small Mistral AI

33.4

Rank #243 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 25 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in 10 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 63.0 to 16.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 94.4% for Claude Opus 4.6 and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
  • Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
  • Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index58.233.4
Released2026-02-042024-02-26
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window1M262K
Max output128K256K
Input $ / M tokens$5$0.15
Output $ / M tokens$25$0.60
Results tracked6839

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Coding15361362
ALE-Bench996.5497.62
SWE-bench Verified78.7%—
FrontierCode26.6%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)75.6%—
LMArena WebDev1547—
SWE-bench Multilingual72%—
SciCode—26.5%
GSO41.2%—
WeirdML78%—
BigCodeBench Instruct—36.1%
LiveBench Coding—36.2%
BigCodeBench Complete—46.6%
AlgoTune1.47—

Agentic & Tool Use Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
Terminal-Bench79.8%—
APEX-Agents46.3%—
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—37.1%
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), Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
Kagi LLM Benchmark83.6%37.8%
LMArena Hard Prompts15271335
DTBench91.2%70.9%
LMCA55.8%20.6%
ARC-AGI-269.2%—
SimpleBench67.6%—
NYT Connections (extended)92.1%—
ARC-AGI-194%—
CritPt—0%
Chess Puzzles17%—
EnigmaEval7.6%—
Thematic Generalization80.6%—
EBR-Bench12.7%—
LiveBench Reasoning—44.8%
Mystery Game Puzzles25%—
LiveBench Data Analysis—53.7%
Epoch Capabilities Index155.24—
ForecastBench60—
LiveBench—44%

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202594.4%5.8%
LMArena Math15191341
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)66%—
FrontierMath Tier 426.8%—
MathArena Final-Answer Competitions78.5%—
ProofBench50%—
LiveBench Math—39.9%
MATH Level 5—46.8%
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)40.7%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)22.9%—

Knowledge Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26), Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
GPQA Diamond90.5%47.5%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.2%5.1%
LMArena Expert15461291
Humanity's Last Exam34.4%—
SimpleQA Verified47%—
MMLU—68.7%

Multimodal Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Vision13161142
Furniture Assembly28.3%—
LMArena Document1507—

Multilingual Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Non-English14891315
LMArena Chinese15511340
LMArena French15131337
LMArena German15021340
LMArena Japanese14841275
LMArena Korean14641259
LMArena Russian14971324
LMArena Spanish15101346

Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Instruction Following15231310
LiveBench Instruction Following—63.7%

Long Context Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Longer Query15201327
CL-bench20.7%—
CL-bench Life17%—

Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Small
LMArena Text15031338
LMArena Creative Writing15051305
LMArena Multi-Turn15131344
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1809—
EQ-Bench 41223—
LiveBench Language—30.5%

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Mistral Small?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 38× 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 Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

Is Claude Opus 4.6 or Mistral Small better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Mistral Small share?

25 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.

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