# Claude Opus 5 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

> Claude Opus 5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 67.7 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-opus-5-vs-mistral-medium-3-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 21

## Summary

- They share 21 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 5 scores higher in 9 categories and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 0 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 5 leads 77.1 to 16.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is NYT Connections (extended): 94.3% for Claude Opus 5 and 12.9% for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper at $1.50 / $7.50 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 5.
- Claude Opus 5 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 67.7 | 39.6 |
| Rank | 4 | 151 |
| Context | 1M | 262K |
| Input $/M | $5 | $1.50 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $7.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 5: 67.0 (#5)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 35.7 (#208)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1694 | 1263 |
| LMArena Coding | 1533 | 1461 |
| DeepSWE | 73.6% | — |
| FrontierCode | 53.4% | — |
| CursorBench | 46.6% | — |
| FrontierSWE | 52% | — |
| SciCode | 56.4% | — |
| WeirdML | 91.8% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 2,165 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 5: 55.5 (#1)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 65.8% | — |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 31.4% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 48.7% | — |
| PostTrainBench | 35% | — |
| BALROG | 63.4% | — |
| GBAEval | 79.6% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 24% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 11,182 | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Opus 5: 77.1 (#3)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 16.6 (#290)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| NYT Connections (extended) | 94.3% | 12.9% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1525 | 1436 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 162.67 | 141.42 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 90.4% | — |
| SimpleBench | 80.6% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 41.4% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 97.5% | — |
| CritPt | 29.1% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 42% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 45.7% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 59% | — |
| DTBench | 97.9% | — |
| LMCA | 64.5% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.12 | — |

## Math

- Claude Opus 5: 86.1 (#6)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.4 (#113)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1533 | 1432 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 85.6% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 73.2% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 98.9% | — |
| ProofBench | 99% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 5: 66.8 (#8)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.3 (#123)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1558 | 1431 |
| GPQA Diamond | 93.9% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 59.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 5: 51.1 (#6)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 37.6 (#64)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1321 | 1222 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 30.4% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 60.8% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1516 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 5: 58.8 (#3)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 52.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1500 | 1405 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1575 | 1443 |
| LMArena French | 1522 | 1448 |
| LMArena German | 1522 | 1453 |
| LMArena Korean | 1526 | 1387 |
| LMArena Russian | 1507 | 1396 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1519 | 1406 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1510 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 5: 79.3 (#5)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.7 (#87)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1516 | 1414 |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 5: 46.5 (#20)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#101)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1516 | 1414 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 5: 79.3 (#2)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.6 (#113)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1506 | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1491 | 1372 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1385 | 993 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1496 | 1423 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 2133 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 5 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Claude Opus 5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 67.7 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper. It lists at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 5 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 5 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Claude Opus 5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 67.0 versus 35.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 5 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 5 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

21 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 5 has 57 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.