Model comparison

Claude Sonnet 4 vs Ministral 3B

Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 25.6 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 150× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 6 shared benchmarks.

Claude Sonnet 4 Anthropic

40.6

Rank #139 Confirmed

Ministral 3B Mistral AI

25.6

Rank #336 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4 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 leads 41.6 to 10.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 84.4% for Claude Sonnet 4 and 14.4% for Ministral 3B.
  • Ministral 3B is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.04 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.
  • Claude Sonnet 4 accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 128K.
  • Ministral 3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 4 and Ministral 3B specifications
Claude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index40.625.6
Released2025-05-222024-10-01
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window200K128K
Max output64K128K
Input $ / M tokens$3$0.04
Output $ / M tokens$15$0.04
Results tracked586

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 44.0 (#70), Ministral 3B: —

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)64.9%—
Aider Polyglot61.3%—
SciCode40%—
GSO4.9%—
WeirdML46.1%—
LMArena Coding1414—
ALE-Bench655.35—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 38.3 (#29), Ministral 3B: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
TheAgentCompany33.1%—
Cybench35%—
DeepResearch Bench46.6%—
OSWorld43.9%—
METR Time Horizons62%—

Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4 leads

Claude Sonnet 4: 23.0 (#169), Ministral 3B: 17.7 (#278)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
DTBench77.1%51.7%
LMCA29%5.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index141.69118.08
ARC-AGI-25.9%—
SimpleBench45.5%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark73%—
ARC-AGI-140%—
CritPt0.3%—
EnigmaEval3.1%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1372—
ForecastBench60.2—

Math Claude Sonnet 4 leads

Claude Sonnet 4: 41.5 (#71), Ministral 3B: 24.5 (#257)

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
MATH Level 584.4%14.4%
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202571.1%—
Omni-MATH60.2%—
LMArena Math1375—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)4.1%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)0%—

Knowledge Claude Sonnet 4 leads

Claude Sonnet 4: 41.6 (#99), Ministral 3B: 10.4 (#297)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
GPQA Diamond79.2%25.3%
Vectara Hallucination Rate10.3%7.3%
Humanity's Last Exam7.8%—
MMLU-Pro84.3%—
Confabulations13.2%—
GPQA (HELM)70.6%—
LMArena Expert1371—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 25.6 (#116), Ministral 3B: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
LMArena Vision1191—
GeoBench37%—
VPCT34%—
MindCube44.8%—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 46.9 (#151), Ministral 3B: —

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
LMArena Non-English1333—
LMArena Chinese1351—
LMArena French1364—
LMArena German1331—
LMArena Japanese1301—
LMArena Korean1293—
LMArena Russian1355—
LMArena Spanish1356—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 71.8 (#141), Ministral 3B: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
IFEval84%—
LMArena Instruction Following1375—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 33.6 (#254), Ministral 3B: —

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
Fiction.LiveBench46.9%—
LMArena Longer Query1398—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4: 57.3 (#127), Ministral 3B: —

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4Ministral 3B
LMArena Text1351—
LMArena Creative Writing1345—
Short-Story Creative Writing81.4%—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1483—
WildBench83.8%—
LMArena Multi-Turn1376—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 4 better than Ministral 3B?

Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 25.6 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 3B costs 150× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4 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 lists at $3 and $15.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Sonnet 4 does, with 200K tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4 and Ministral 3B share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4 has 58 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 3B has 6.

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