Model comparison
Claude Opus 4 vs Mistral Small
Claude Opus 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 114× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 26 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 26 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4 scores higher in 8 categories and Mistral Small in 2 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4 leads 42.0 to 16.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 64.4% for Claude Opus 4 and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $15 / $75 for Claude Opus 4.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 43.1 | 33.4 |
| Released | 2025-05-22 | 2024-02-26 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 200K | 262K |
| Max output | 32K | 256K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $15 | $0.15 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $75 | $0.60 |
| Results tracked | 56 | 39 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 47.2 (#62), Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1442 | 1362 |
| SWE-bench Verified | 70.7% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 67.6% | — |
| Aider Polyglot | 72% | — |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| GSO | 6.9% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.7% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |
| AlgoTune | 1.33 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 34.8 (#42), Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
| Cybench | 38% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 46.8% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1127 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 63.9% | — |
Reasoning Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 27.3 (#121), Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 74.3% | 37.8% |
| CritPt | 0.3% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1399 | 1335 |
| DTBench | 81.6% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 37.4% | 20.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 8.6% | — |
| SimpleBench | 58.8% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 35.7% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 5.6% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 142.67 | — |
| ForecastBench | 61.1 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |
Math Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 42.0 (#86), Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 64.4% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1390 | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | 85% | 46.8% |
| Omni-MATH | 61.6% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 4.5% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 4.2% | — |
Knowledge Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 44.0 (#88), Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 76.3% | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1386 | 1291 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 10.7% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 87.5% | — |
| Confabulations | 15.9% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 70.8% | — |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |
Multimodal Mistral Small leads
Claude Opus 4: 31.5 (#106), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1192 | 1142 |
| GeoBench | 49% | — |
| VPCT | 38% | — |
Multilingual Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 48.8 (#138), Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1362 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1386 | 1340 |
| LMArena French | 1372 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1391 | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1331 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1321 | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | 1392 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1389 | 1346 |
Instruction Following Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 77.1 (#28), Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1406 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
| IFEval | 91.8% | — |
Long Context Too close to call
Claude Opus 4: 39.6 (#172), Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1422 | 1327 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 61.1% | — |
Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4 leads
Claude Opus 4: 61.2 (#89), Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1377 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1387 | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1396 | 1344 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 83.6% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1580 | — |
| WildBench | 85.2% | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Opus 4 better than Mistral Small?
Claude Opus 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 114× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4 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 lists at $15 and $75.
Is Claude Opus 4 or Mistral Small better for coding?
Claude Opus 4 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.2 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mistral Small does, with 262K tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4 and Mistral Small share?
26 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4 has 56 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.