# Claude Sonnet 4 vs Ministral 8B

> Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 8B costs 60× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-sonnet-4-vs-ministral-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 16

## Summary

- They share 16 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher in 8 categories and Ministral 8B in 1 category; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude Sonnet 4 leads 41.6 to 12.5.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 84.4% for Claude Sonnet 4 and 14.9% for Ministral 8B.
- Ministral 8B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.10 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.
- Claude Sonnet 4 accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 128K.
- Ministral 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 40.6 | 27.8 |
| Rank | 139 | 321 |
| Context | 200K | 128K |
| Input $/M | $3 | $0.10 |
| Output $/M | $15 | $0.10 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Sonnet 4: 44.0 (#70)
- Ministral 8B: 34.4 (#226)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1414 | 1202 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 64.9% | — |
| Aider Polyglot | 61.3% | — |
| SciCode | 40% | — |
| GSO | 4.9% | — |
| WeirdML | 46.1% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 655.35 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Sonnet 4: 38.3 (#29)
- Ministral 8B: 16.2 (#140)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 11.1% |
| TheAgentCompany | 33.1% | — |
| Cybench | 35% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 46.6% | — |
| OSWorld | 43.9% | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 62% | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Sonnet 4: 23.0 (#169)
- Ministral 8B: 17.7 (#279)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1372 | 1191 |
| DTBench | 77.1% | 45.7% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 5.9% | — |
| SimpleBench | 45.5% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 73% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 40% | — |
| CritPt | 0.3% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 3.1% | — |
| LMCA | 29% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 141.69 | — |
| ForecastBench | 60.2 | — |

## Math

- Claude Sonnet 4: 41.5 (#71)
- Ministral 8B: 23.7 (#262)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1375 | 1188 |
| MATH Level 5 | 84.4% | 14.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 71.1% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 60.2% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 4.1% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Sonnet 4: 41.6 (#99)
- Ministral 8B: 12.5 (#292)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 79.2% | 27.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 10.3% | 7.4% |
| LMArena Expert | 1371 | 1170 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 7.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 84.3% | — |
| Confabulations | 13.2% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 70.6% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Sonnet 4: 25.6 (#116)
- Ministral 8B: —

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1191 | — |
| GeoBench | 37% | — |
| VPCT | 34% | — |
| MindCube | 44.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Sonnet 4: 46.9 (#151)
- Ministral 8B: 35.3 (#242)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1333 | 1165 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1351 | 1193 |
| LMArena Russian | 1355 | 1195 |
| LMArena French | 1364 | — |
| LMArena German | 1331 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1301 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1293 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1356 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Sonnet 4: 71.8 (#141)
- Ministral 8B: 60.7 (#245)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1375 | 1161 |
| IFEval | 84% | — |

## Long Context

- Claude Sonnet 4: 33.6 (#254)
- Ministral 8B: 36.7 (#222)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1398 | 1212 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 46.9% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Sonnet 4: 57.3 (#127)
- Ministral 8B: 39.8 (#241)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1351 | 1191 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1345 | 1175 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1376 | 1166 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 81.4% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1483 | — |
| WildBench | 83.8% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 better than Ministral 8B?

Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 8B costs 60× 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 8B?

Ministral 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4 lists at $3 and $15.

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 or Ministral 8B better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 44.0 versus 34.4 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

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

### How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4 and Ministral 8B share?

16 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4 has 58 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 8B has 17.