Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small
Comparing Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Anthropic · Mistral AI · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
On price, Mistral Small is roughly 100.0x cheaper per token on a blended 3:1 input/output basis, which adds up quickly at production volume.
Claude 3 Opus also accepts a larger context window (200,000 input tokens), making it the stronger choice for long documents and large codebases.
Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Claude 3 Opus
- you process long inputs — it offers a 200,000 token context window
Choose Mistral Small
- cost matters — it's about 100.0x cheaper per token
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2024
- you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Individual benchmarks
11 reported for Claude 3 Opus · 0 for Mistral Small
Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Smalldon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.
Human preference
Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores
Pricing Analysis
Price comparison per million tokens
For input processing, Claude 3 Opus ($15.00/1M tokens) is 75.0x more expensive than Mistral Small ($0.20/1M tokens).
For output processing, Claude 3 Opus ($75.00/1M tokens) is 125.0x more expensive than Mistral Small ($0.60/1M tokens).
In conclusion, Claude 3 Opus 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 Opus accepts 200,000 input tokens compared to Mistral Small's 32,768 tokens. Claude 3 Opus can generate longer responses up to 200,000 tokens, while Mistral Small is limited to 32,768 tokens.
Input capabilities
Documented input modalities across available providers
Claude 3 Opus supports multimodal inputs, whereas Mistral Small does not.
Claude 3 Opus can handle both text and other forms of data like images, making it suitable for multimodal applications.
Claude 3 Opus
Mistral Small
License
Usage and distribution terms
Claude 3 Opus 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 Opus was released on 2024-02-29, while Mistral Small was released on 2024-09-17.
Mistral Small is 7 months newer than Claude 3 Opus.
Feb 29, 2024
2.5 years ago
Sep 17, 2024
1.9 years ago
6mo newerKnowledge 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 Opus is available from Anthropic, Bedrock, Google. Mistral Small is available from Mistral AI.
Claude 3 Opus
Mistral Small
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small.