# Claude 3 Sonnet vs Mistral Small

> Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-sonnet-vs-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 25

## Summary

- They share 25 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Small in 8 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mistral Small leads 52.5 to 42.1.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 18.2% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 46.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 29.0 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 319 | 243 |
| Context | — | 262K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.6 (#302)
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 42.7% | 36.1% |
| LMArena Coding | 1223 | 1362 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 53.8% | 46.6% |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| WeirdML | 10.2% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 497.62 |
| HumanEval+ | 64% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.3% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3 Sonnet: —
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 20.5 (#237)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1197 | 1335 |
| DTBench | 53.6% | 70.9% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| LMCA | — | 20.6% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.7 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |
| WinoGrande | 75.1% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.7 (#310)
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.5% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1213 | 1341 |
| MATH Level 5 | 18.2% | 46.8% |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#276)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 40.6% | 47.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1173 | 1291 |
| MMLU | 75.9% | 68.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 25.2 (#125)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 984 | 1142 |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 37.8 (#234)
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1205 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1189 | 1340 |
| LMArena French | 1229 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1204 | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1131 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1128 | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | 1227 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1204 | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 62.8 (#235)
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1199 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#228)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1211 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.1 (#238)
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1218 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1227 | 1344 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is the stronger model overall, scoring 33.4 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Mistral Small better for coding?

Mistral Small scores higher on coding benchmarks: 34.0 versus 29.6 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Mistral Small share?

25 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.