Model comparison
Claude Opus 4.1 vs Mistral Small
Claude Opus 4.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.8 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 114× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 23 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 23 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.1 scores higher in 9 categories and Mistral Small in 1 category; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.1 leads 31.6 to 19.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 68.9% for Claude Opus 4.1 and 5.8% for Mistral Small.
- Mistral Small is cheaper at $0.15 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens, against $15 / $75 for Claude Opus 4.1.
- Mistral Small accepts more context: 256K tokens versus 200K.
- Mistral Small has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 40.8 | 33.1 |
| Released | 2025-08-05 | 2024-02-26 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 200K | 256K |
| Max output | 32K | 256K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $15 | $0.15 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $75 | $0.60 |
| Results tracked | 48 | 39 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 44.3 (#69), Mistral Small: 33.5 (#242)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1479 | 1363 |
| ALE-Bench | 674.77 | 497.62 |
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1390 | — |
| SciCode | — | 26.5% |
| WeirdML | 45.9% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 36.1% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 46.6% |
| AlgoTune | 1.34 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 34.8 (#38), Mistral Small: 27.9 (#87)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 38% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 37.1% |
| GDPval | 43.6% | — |
| Cybench | 42% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 48.3% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1148 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 66.8% | — |
Reasoning Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 31.6 (#70), Mistral Small: 19.3 (#238)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1443 | 1336 |
| DTBench | 80% | 70.9% |
| LMCA | 37.1% | 20.6% |
| SimpleBench | 60% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 37.8% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | 7% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 7.2% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 7.9% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 44.8% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 21% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 53.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 144.11 | — |
| ForecastBench | 62 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 44% |
Math Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 22.0 (#267), Mistral Small: 15.4 (#287)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 68.9% | 5.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1430 | 1341 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 12.6% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 2.4% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 39.9% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 46.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 7.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 4.2% | — |
Knowledge Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 41.9 (#93), Mistral Small: 30.9 (#214)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 77.3% | 47.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 11.8% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1439 | 1293 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 11.5% | — |
| Confabulations | 17.1% | — |
| MMLU | — | 68.7% |
Multimodal Mistral Small leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 26.2 (#114), Mistral Small: 32.9 (#91)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1142 |
| VPCT | 35% | — |
Multilingual Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 52.1 (#90), Mistral Small: 45.7 (#164)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1405 | 1315 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1427 | 1342 |
| LMArena French | 1432 | 1337 |
| LMArena German | 1412 | 1341 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1378 | 1275 |
| LMArena Korean | 1381 | 1260 |
| LMArena Russian | 1421 | 1324 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1448 | 1346 |
Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 75.8 (#53), Mistral Small: 66.6 (#204)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1436 | 1310 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 63.7% |
Long Context Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 44.5 (#60), Mistral Small: 40.4 (#151)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1455 | 1327 |
Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.1 leads
Claude Opus 4.1: 62.6 (#70), Mistral Small: 52.6 (#165)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.1 | Mistral Small |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1419 | 1338 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1412 | 1304 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1444 | 1344 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 84.7% | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 30.5% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Opus 4.1 better than Mistral Small?
Claude Opus 4.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.8 to 33.1 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Small costs 114× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.1 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 4.1 lists at $15 and $75.
Is Claude Opus 4.1 or Mistral Small better for coding?
Claude Opus 4.1 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 44.3 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mistral Small does, with 256K tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.1 and Mistral Small share?
23 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.1 has 48 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small has 39.