Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.8 vs Codestral

Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 22× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 2 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic

60.7

Rank #13 Confirmed

Codestral Mistral AI

30.6

Rank #290 Reported

Summary

  • They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in 2 categories and Codestral in 0 categories; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.8 leads 64.7 to 19.8.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 88.8% for Claude Opus 4.8 and 32.5% for Codestral.
  • Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.8.
  • Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 256K.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.8 and Codestral specifications
Claude Opus 4.8Codestral
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index60.730.6
Released2026-05-282024-05-29
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window1M256K
Max output128K8K
Input $ / M tokens$5$0.30
Output $ / M tokens$25$0.90
Results tracked657

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.8 leads

Claude Opus 4.8: 59.9 (#12), Codestral: 27.3 (#321)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
ALE-Bench1,564137.78
DeepSWE59%—
FrontierCode46.5%—
Aider Polyglot—11.1%
LMArena WebDev1556—
SciCode53.5%—
GSO47.1%—
WeirdML82.9%—
BigCodeBench Instruct—41.8%
LMArena Coding1490—
BigCodeBench Complete—52.5%
HumanEval+—73.8%
MBPP+—61.9%

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 47.6 (#11), Codestral: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
APEX-Agents48.9%—
OSWorld 2.020.6%—
Remote Labor Index8.3%—
τ²-bench Banking39.7%—
DeepResearch Bench50.2%—
PostTrainBench33.8%—
GBAEval70.9%—
GDP.pdf24%—
LMArena Search1204—
Vending-Bench 25,787—

Reasoning Claude Opus 4.8 leads

Claude Opus 4.8: 64.7 (#16), Codestral: 19.8 (#251)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
Kagi LLM Benchmark88.8%32.5%
ARC-AGI-272.1%—
SimpleBench64.8%—
NYT Connections (extended)91.1%—
ARC-AGI-192.5%—
CritPt20.9%—
Chess Puzzles34%—
EnigmaEval23.5%—
EBR-Bench28.6%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1482—
Mystery Game Puzzles36%—
DTBench94.9%—
LMCA57.5%—
Surface Evolver Bench87.5%—
Bench to the Future 30.14—
Epoch Capabilities Index158.21—
ForecastBench59.9—

Math Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 78.4 (#13), Codestral: —

Knowledge Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 61.3 (#29), Codestral: —

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
GPQA Diamond91%—
SimpleQA Verified53%—
LMArena Expert1502—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 42.9 (#26), Codestral: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
LMArena Vision1294—
Blueprint-Bench 214.5%—
Furniture Assembly42.5%—
LMArena Document1475—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 55.2 (#33), Codestral: —

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
LMArena Non-English1450—
LMArena Chinese1507—
LMArena French1481—
LMArena German1472—
LMArena Japanese1440—
LMArena Korean1432—
LMArena Russian1474—
LMArena Spanish1466—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 77.4 (#24), Codestral: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
LMArena Instruction Following1476—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 45.4 (#35), Codestral: —

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
LMArena Longer Query1483—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.8: 72.0 (#16), Codestral: —

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.8Codestral
LMArena Text1461—
LMArena Creative Writing1454—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1840—
EQ-Bench 41281—
LMArena Multi-Turn1476—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Codestral?

Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 22× 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 Codestral?

Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 and $25.

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Codestral better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 59.9 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.8 does, with 1M tokens against 256K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.8 and Codestral share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.8 has 65 scored results on Noometry and Codestral has 7.

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