Noometry

Model comparison

Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Ministral 3B

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 50.1 to 25.6 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 150× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 5 shared benchmarks.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic

50.1

Rank #42 Confirmed

Ministral 3B Mistral AI

25.6

Rank #336 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 5 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher in 3 categories and Ministral 3B in 0 categories; 3 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads 51.6 to 10.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 87.4% for Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 25.3% for Ministral 3B.
  • Ministral 3B is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.04 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
  • Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.
  • Ministral 3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index50.125.6
Released2026-02-172024-10-01
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window1M128K
Max output128K128K
Input $ / M tokens$3$0.04
Output $ / M tokens$15$0.04
Results tracked576

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.0 (#62), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
SWE-bench Verified75.2%—
DeepSWE29.9%—
FrontierCode24.3%—
LMArena WebDev1521—
SciCode46.8%—
WeirdML66.1%—
LMArena Coding1504—
ALE-Bench1,327—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 39.1 (#26), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
Terminal-Bench53.4%—
APEX-Agents43%—
OSWorld 2.09.3%—
DeepResearch Bench54.9%—
OSWorld72.1%—
ExploitBench23.6%—
GBAEval48.8%—
GDP.pdf18%—
LMArena Search1221—
Vending-Bench 27,204—

Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.1 (#40), Ministral 3B: 17.7 (#278)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
DTBench89.9%51.7%
LMCA46.5%5.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index152.25118.08
ARC-AGI-260.4%—
NYT Connections (extended)80.9%—
ARC-AGI-186.5%—
CritPt3.1%—
Chess Puzzles13%—
Thematic Generalization76.3%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1485—
Mystery Game Puzzles16%—
ForecastBench62—

Math Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.9 (#41), Ministral 3B: 24.5 (#257)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202585.8%—
ProofBench45%—
LMArena Math1463—
MATH Level 5—14.4%
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)32.4%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)8.3%—

Knowledge Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.6 (#60), Ministral 3B: 10.4 (#297)

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
GPQA Diamond87.4%25.3%
Vectara Hallucination Rate10.6%7.3%
SimpleQA Verified35.5%—
LMArena Expert1500—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 38.0 (#61), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Vision1283—
Blueprint-Bench 26.7%—
LMArena Document1482—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 54.6 (#39), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Non-English1440—
LMArena Chinese1491—
LMArena French1465—
LMArena German1428—
LMArena Japanese1419—
LMArena Korean1411—
LMArena Russian1440—
LMArena Spanish1465—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 77.6 (#23), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Instruction Following1476—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 45.3 (#40), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Longer Query1479—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 70.4 (#22), Ministral 3B: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Ministral 3B
LMArena Text1458—
LMArena Creative Writing1435—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1810—
EQ-Bench 41207—
LMArena Multi-Turn1464—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Ministral 3B?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 50.1 to 25.6 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 150× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Ministral 3B?

Ministral 3B is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.04 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.6 lists at $3 and $15.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Ministral 3B share?

5 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.6 has 57 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 3B has 6.

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