# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Magistral Medium

> Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 34.8 on the Noometry Index. Magistral Medium costs 3.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-opus-4-8-vs-magistral-medium
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 22

## Summary

- They share 22 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in 8 categories and Magistral Medium in 0 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.8 leads 64.6 to 8.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is ARC-AGI-1: 92.5% for Claude Opus 4.8 and 6.1% for Magistral Medium.
- Magistral Medium is cheaper at $2 / $5 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.8.
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.
- Magistral Medium has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 60.7 | 34.8 |
| Rank | 9 | 224 |
| Context | 1M | 128K |
| Input $/M | $5 | $2 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $5 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 4.8: 60.2 (#9)
- Magistral Medium: 38.6 (#161)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 53.5% | 39.2% |
| LMArena Coding | 1491 | 1319 |
| DeepSWE | 59% | — |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1556 | — |
| GSO | 47.1% | — |
| WeirdML | 82.9% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 1,564 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 4.8: 47.6 (#10)
- Magistral Medium: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 48.9% | — |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 20.6% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 8.3% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 39.7% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 50.2% | — |
| PostTrainBench | 33.8% | — |
| GBAEval | 70.9% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 24% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1204 | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 5,787 | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Opus 4.8: 64.6 (#14)
- Magistral Medium: 8.7 (#342)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 72.1% | 0% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | 16.2% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 92.5% | 6.1% |
| CritPt | 20.9% | 0.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1481 | 1267 |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 91.1% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 34% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 23.5% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 28.6% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 36% | — |
| DTBench | 94.9% | — |
| LMCA | 57.5% | — |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 87.5% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.3 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.9 | — |

## Math

- Claude Opus 4.8: 78.2 (#11)
- Magistral Medium: 32.4 (#187)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1487 | 1249 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 80% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 56.1% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 91.8% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 98.3% | — |
| ProofBench | 69% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 47.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 31.3% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 4.8: 61.3 (#26)
- Magistral Medium: 32.9 (#199)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1501 | 1222 |
| GPQA Diamond | 91% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 53% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 4.8: 43.2 (#20)
- Magistral Medium: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1295 | — |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 14.5% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 42.5% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1475 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 4.8: 55.4 (#31)
- Magistral Medium: 39.8 (#219)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1450 | 1232 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1509 | 1225 |
| LMArena French | 1482 | 1268 |
| LMArena German | 1470 | 1248 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1440 | 1176 |
| LMArena Korean | 1432 | 1125 |
| LMArena Russian | 1476 | 1224 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1470 | 1269 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 4.8: 77.6 (#22)
- Magistral Medium: 66.2 (#207)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1476 | 1254 |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 4.8: 45.4 (#37)
- Magistral Medium: 39.3 (#178)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1482 | 1295 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 4.8: 72.1 (#17)
- Magistral Medium: 46.5 (#214)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1460 | 1255 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1453 | 1245 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1476 | 1275 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1840 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Magistral Medium?

Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 34.8 on the Noometry Index. Magistral Medium costs 3.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Magistral Medium?

Magistral Medium is cheaper. It lists at $2 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Magistral Medium better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 60.2 versus 38.6 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.8 does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.8 and Magistral Medium share?

22 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.8 has 65 scored results on Noometry and Magistral Medium has 22.