Noometry

Model comparison

Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.0 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 2.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 20 shared benchmarks.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 Anthropic

44.0

Rank #76 Confirmed

Mistral Medium 3.5 Mistral AI

39.6

Rank #151 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 20 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher in 7 categories and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 2 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in coding, where Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads 47.8 to 35.7.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is NYT Connections (extended): 37.3% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 12.9% for Mistral Medium 3.5.
  • Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper at $1.50 / $7.50 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
  • Claude Sonnet 4.5 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
  • Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index44.039.6
Released2025-09-29—
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window1M262K
Max output64K210K
Input $ / M tokens$3$1.50
Output $ / M tokens$15$7.50
Results tracked7322

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Category by category

Coding Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 47.8 (#54), Mistral Medium 3.5: 35.7 (#208)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena WebDev13931263
LMArena Coding14891461
SWE-bench Verified71.3%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)71.4%—
SWE-bench Multilingual67%—
SciCode44.7%—
GSO14.7%—
WeirdML47.7%—
ALE-Bench796.15—
AlgoTune1.52—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 38.1 (#30), Mistral Medium 3.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
Terminal-Bench46.5%—
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard73.2%—
GDPval42.5%—
Remote Labor Index2.1%—
τ²-bench Airline72%—
τ²-bench Banking25.3%—
τ²-bench Retail72.4%—
τ²-bench Telecom84.9%—
Cybench60%—
DeepResearch Bench52.6%—
OSWorld62.9%—
LMArena Search1159—
METR Time Horizons67.4%—
Vending-Bench 23,839—

Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 26.9 (#113), Mistral Medium 3.5: 16.6 (#290)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
Kagi LLM Benchmark57.9%41.4%
NYT Connections (extended)37.3%12.9%
LMArena Hard Prompts14621436
Epoch Capabilities Index146.84141.42
ARC-AGI-213.6%—
SimpleBench54.3%—
ARC-AGI-163.7%—
CritPt1.1%—
Chess Puzzles12%—
EnigmaEval6%—
EBR-Bench2.4%—
Mystery Game Puzzles17%—
DTBench83.2%—
LMCA38.8%—
ForecastBench61.9—

Math Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 31.9 (#190), Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.4 (#113)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Math14481432
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)23.9%—
FrontierMath Tier 42.4%—
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202577.8%—
ProofBench19%—
Omni-MATH55.3%—
MATH Level 597.7%—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)15.2%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)4.2%—

Knowledge Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 48.4 (#70), Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.3 (#123)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Expert14831431
GPQA Diamond82.3%—
Humanity's Last Exam13.7%—
SimpleQA Verified30.7%—
MMLU-Pro86.9%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate12%—
GPQA (HELM)68.6%—

Multimodal Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 34.1 (#84), Mistral Medium 3.5: 37.6 (#64)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Vision—1222
VPCT39.8%—
LMArena Document1450—

Multilingual Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 53.6 (#65), Mistral Medium 3.5: 52.1 (#93)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Non-English14251405
LMArena Chinese14591443
LMArena French14591448
LMArena German14271453
LMArena Korean14031387
LMArena Russian14361396
LMArena Spanish14571406
LMArena Japanese1390—

Instruction Following Too close to call

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 75.2 (#74), Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.7 (#87)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Instruction Following14591414
IFEval85%—

Long Context Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 45.2 (#45), Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#101)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Longer Query14761414

Writing & Preference Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 66.7 (#33), Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.6 (#113)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Text14391421
LMArena Creative Writing14421372
LMArena Multi-Turn14651423
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1678—
WildBench85.4%—
EQ-Bench 4—993

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.0 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 2.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper. It lists at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.5 lists at $3 and $15.

Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.8 versus 35.7 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

20 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.5 has 73 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.

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