Noometry

Model comparison

Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Mistral Small

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 23× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 28 shared benchmarks.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 Anthropic

44.1

Rank #81 Confirmed

Mistral Small Mistral AI

33.4

Rank #243 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 28 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher in 10 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads 48.4 to 31.0.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 77.8% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
  • Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
  • Mistral Small accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
  • Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index44.133.4
Released2025-09-292024-02-26
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window200K262K
Max output64K256K
Input $ / M tokens$3$0.15
Output $ / M tokens$15$0.60
Results tracked7339

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Category by category

Coding Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 47.3 (#61), Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
SciCode44.7%26.5%
LMArena Coding14891362
ALE-Bench796.15497.62
SWE-bench Verified71.3%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)71.4%—
LMArena WebDev1393—
SWE-bench Multilingual67%—
GSO14.7%—
WeirdML47.7%—
BigCodeBench Instruct—36.1%
LiveBench Coding—36.2%
BigCodeBench Complete—46.6%
AlgoTune1.52—

Agentic & Tool Use Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 38.3 (#32), Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard73.2%37.1%
Terminal-Bench46.5%—
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 (#125), Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
Kagi LLM Benchmark57.9%37.8%
CritPt1.1%0%
LMArena Hard Prompts14621335
DTBench83.2%70.9%
LMCA38.8%20.6%
ARC-AGI-213.6%—
SimpleBench54.3%—
NYT Connections (extended)37.3%—
ARC-AGI-163.7%—
Chess Puzzles12%—
EnigmaEval6%—
EBR-Bench2.4%—
LiveBench Reasoning—44.8%
Mystery Game Puzzles17%—
LiveBench Data Analysis—53.7%
Epoch Capabilities Index146.84—
ForecastBench61.9—
LiveBench—44%

Math Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 32.3 (#216), Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202577.8%5.8%
LMArena Math14491341
MATH Level 597.7%46.8%
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)23.9%—
FrontierMath Tier 42.4%—
ProofBench19%—
Omni-MATH55.3%—
LiveBench Math—39.9%
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)15.2%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)4.2%—

Knowledge Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 48.4 (#76), Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
GPQA Diamond82.3%47.5%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12%5.1%
LMArena Expert14821291
Humanity's Last Exam13.7%—
SimpleQA Verified30.7%—
MMLU-Pro86.9%—
GPQA (HELM)68.6%—
MMLU—68.7%

Multimodal Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 34.8 (#89), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
LMArena Vision—1142
VPCT39.8%—
LMArena Document1450—

Multilingual Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 53.4 (#69), Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
LMArena Non-English14251315
LMArena Chinese14591340
LMArena French14581337
LMArena German14271340
LMArena Japanese13901275
LMArena Korean14031259
LMArena Russian14371324
LMArena Spanish14571346

Instruction Following Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 75.0 (#78), Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
LMArena Instruction Following14591310
LiveBench Instruction Following—63.7%
IFEval85%—

Long Context Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 45.2 (#46), Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
LMArena Longer Query14761327

Writing & Preference Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.5: 66.5 (#34), Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.5Mistral Small
LMArena Text14391338
LMArena Creative Writing14421305
LMArena Multi-Turn14651344
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1678—
WildBench85.4%—
LiveBench Language—30.5%

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 better than Mistral Small?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 23× 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 Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.5 lists at $3 and $15.

Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Mistral Small better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.3 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 Sonnet 4.5 and Mistral Small share?

28 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.5 has 73 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.

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