# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Small

> Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 38× 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-mistral-small
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 26

## Summary

- They share 26 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in 10 categories and Mistral Small in 0 categories; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4.8 leads 78.4 to 16.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 98.3% for Claude Opus 4.8 and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.8.
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 60.7 | 33.4 |
| Rank | 13 | 243 |
| Context | 1M | 262K |
| Input $/M | $5 | $0.15 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $0.60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 4.8: 59.9 (#12)
- Mistral Small: 34.0 (#247)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 53.5% | 26.5% |
| LMArena Coding | 1490 | 1362 |
| ALE-Bench | 1,564 | 497.62 |
| DeepSWE | 59% | — |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1556 | — |
| GSO | 47.1% | — |
| WeirdML | 82.9% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 4.8: 47.6 (#11)
- Mistral Small: 28.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 48.9% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
| 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: 64.7 (#16)
- Mistral Small: 19.8 (#250)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | 37.8% |
| CritPt | 20.9% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1482 | 1335 |
| DTBench | 94.9% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 57.5% | 20.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 72.1% | — |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 91.1% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 92.5% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 34% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 23.5% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 28.6% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 36% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 87.5% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.21 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.9 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |

## Math

- Claude Opus 4.8: 78.4 (#13)
- Mistral Small: 16.4 (#293)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 98.3% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1487 | 1341 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 80% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 56.1% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 91.8% | — |
| ProofBench | 69% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 47.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 31.3% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 4.8: 61.3 (#29)
- Mistral Small: 31.0 (#222)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 91% | 47.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1502 | 1291 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 53% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.1% |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 4.8: 42.9 (#26)
- Mistral Small: 33.5 (#96)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1294 | 1142 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 14.5% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 42.5% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1475 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 4.8: 55.2 (#33)
- Mistral Small: 45.5 (#169)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1450 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1507 | 1340 |
| LMArena French | 1481 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1472 | 1340 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1440 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1432 | 1259 |
| LMArena Russian | 1474 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1466 | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 4.8: 77.4 (#24)
- Mistral Small: 66.4 (#209)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1476 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 4.8: 45.4 (#35)
- Mistral Small: 40.4 (#156)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1483 | 1327 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 4.8: 72.0 (#16)
- Mistral Small: 52.5 (#171)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1461 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1454 | 1305 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1476 | 1344 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1840 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Mistral Small?

Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 33.4 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 38× 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 Mistral Small?

Mistral Small is cheaper. It lists at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Small better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 59.9 versus 34.0 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.8 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Small share?

26 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.8 has 65 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.