Model comparison
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Small 3
Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3 costs 174× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 21 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 21 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in 8 categories and Mistral Small 3 in 0 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4.8 leads 78.4 to 16.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 98.3% for Claude Opus 4.8 and 6.7% for Mistral Small 3.
- Mistral Small 3 is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.08 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.8.
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 33K.
- Mistral Small 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 60.7 | 31.2 |
| Released | 2026-05-28 | 2025-01-30 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 1M | 33K |
| Max output | 128K | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $5 | $0.05 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $25 | $0.08 |
| Results tracked | 65 | 24 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 59.9 (#12), Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1490 | 1246 |
| DeepSWE | 59% | — |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1556 | — |
| SciCode | 53.5% | — |
| GSO | 47.1% | — |
| WeirdML | 82.9% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 45.3% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 50.4% |
| ALE-Bench | 1,564 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Claude Opus 4.8: 47.6 (#11), Mistral Small 3: —
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 48.9% | — |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 20.6% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 8.3% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 39.7% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 50.2% | — |
| PostTrainBench | 33.8% | — |
| GBAEval | 70.9% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 24% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1204 | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 5,787 | — |
Reasoning Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 64.7 (#16), Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 34% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1482 | 1233 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.21 | 127.07 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 72.1% | — |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 91.1% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 92.5% | — |
| CritPt | 20.9% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 23.5% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 28.6% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 36% | — |
| DTBench | 94.9% | — |
| LMCA | 57.5% | — |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 87.5% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.9 | — |
Math Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 78.4 (#13), Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 98.3% | 6.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1487 | 1240 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 80% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 56.1% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 91.8% | — |
| ProofBench | 69% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 47.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 31.3% | — |
Knowledge Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 61.3 (#29), Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 91% | 47.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1502 | 1202 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 53% | — |
| Confabulations | — | 25.2% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Claude Opus 4.8: 42.9 (#26), Mistral Small 3: —
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1294 | — |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 14.5% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 42.5% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1475 | — |
Multilingual Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 55.2 (#33), Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1450 | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1507 | 1204 |
| LMArena French | 1481 | 1203 |
| LMArena German | 1472 | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1440 | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | 1432 | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | 1474 | 1216 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1466 | — |
Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 77.4 (#24), Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1476 | 1214 |
Long Context Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 45.4 (#35), Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1483 | 1246 |
Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.8 leads
Claude Opus 4.8: 72.0 (#16), Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1461 | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1454 | 1195 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1840 | 707 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1476 | 1217 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Mistral Small 3?
Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small 3 costs 174× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Small 3?
Mistral Small 3 is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 and $25.
Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Small 3 better for coding?
Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 59.9 versus 36.5 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Claude Opus 4.8 does, with 1M tokens against 33K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Small 3 share?
21 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.8 has 65 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.