Claude 3.5 Haiku vs Mistral Small
Comparing Claude 3.5 Haiku and Mistral Small across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Anthropic · Mistral AI · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Claude 3.5 Haiku and Mistral Small trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
On price, Mistral Small is roughly 5.3x cheaper per token on a blended 3:1 input/output basis, which adds up quickly at production volume.
Claude 3.5 Haiku also accepts a larger context window (200,000 input tokens), making it the stronger choice for long documents and large codebases.
Based on current benchmark, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Claude 3.5 Haiku
- you process long inputs — it offers a 200,000 token context window
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2024
Choose Mistral Small
- cost matters — it's about 5.3x cheaper per token
- you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Performance Benchmarks
Comparative analysis across standard metrics
Claude 3.5 Haiku and Mistral Smalldon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.
Arena Performance
Playground indexes and blind preference scores
Pricing Analysis
Price comparison per million tokens
For input processing, Claude 3.5 Haiku ($0.80/1M tokens) is 4.0x more expensive than Mistral Small ($0.20/1M tokens).
For output processing, Claude 3.5 Haiku ($4.00/1M tokens) is 6.7x more expensive than Mistral Small ($0.60/1M tokens).
In conclusion, Claude 3.5 Haiku is more expensive than Mistral Small.*
* Using a 3:1 ratio of input to output tokens
Context Window
Maximum input and output token capacity
Claude 3.5 Haiku accepts 200,000 input tokens compared to Mistral Small's 32,768 tokens. Claude 3.5 Haiku can generate longer responses up to 200,000 tokens, while Mistral Small is limited to 32,768 tokens.
License
Usage and distribution terms
Claude 3.5 Haiku is licensed under a proprietary license, while Mistral Small uses Mistral Research License.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
Proprietary
Closed source
Mistral Research License
Open weights
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
Claude 3.5 Haiku was released on 2024-10-22, while Mistral Small was released on 2024-09-17.
Claude 3.5 Haiku is 1 month newer than Mistral Small.
Oct 22, 2024
1.8 years ago
1mo newerSep 17, 2024
1.9 years ago
Knowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Provider Availability
Claude 3.5 Haiku is available from Bedrock, Google, Anthropic. Mistral Small is available from Mistral AI.
Claude 3.5 Haiku
Mistral Small
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Claude 3.5 Haiku and Mistral Small side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Claude 3.5 Haiku vs Mistral Small.