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Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct are closely matched at 10.0 and 4.4 on the LLM Stats Score. Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is 342.9x cheaper per token.

Anthropic · Mistral AI · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct are closely matched on the overall LLM Stats Score at 10.0 and 4.4.

In the 4 individual benchmarks reported for both models, Claude 3 Opus wins 3; this is a narrower head-to-head signal than the composite indexes.

On price, Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is roughly 342.9x 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 value its reported benchmark strengths — it wins 3 of 4 exact shared results
  • you process long inputs — it offers a 200,000 token context window

Choose Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

  • cost matters — it's about 342.9x cheaper per token
  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Jan 2025
  • you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Claude 3 Opus
Anthropic
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Mistral AI
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
10.0
#256
4.4
#290
Reasoning
9.9
#249
3.9
#286
Coding
5.2
#196
4.8
#198
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
3 of 4
1 of 4
Input price
$15.00 / M
$0.07 / M
Output price
$75.00 / M
$0.14 / M
Context window
200,000
32,000

Capability indexes

Additional strengths measured across groups of related public benchmarks

1 shared
Index
Claude 3 Opus
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Math
16.4#199
7.1#259
Conservative TrueSkill rating · higher is betterHow scores work

Individual benchmarks

11 reported for Claude 3 Opus · 8 for Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

4 shared

Claude 3 Opus outperforms in 3 benchmarks (GPQA, HumanEval, MMLU-Pro), while Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is better at 1 benchmark (MATH).

Claude 3 Opus shows notably better performance in the majority of benchmarks.

Mon Sep 07 2026 • llm-stats.com

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Pricing Analysis

Price comparison per million tokens

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct costs less

For input processing, Claude 3 Opus ($15.00/1M tokens) is 214.3x more expensive than Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct ($0.07/1M tokens).

For output processing, Claude 3 Opus ($75.00/1M tokens) is 535.7x more expensive than Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct ($0.14/1M tokens).

In conclusion, Claude 3 Opus is more expensive than Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct.*

* Using a 3:1 ratio of input to output tokens

Lowest available price from all providers
Mon Sep 07 2026 • llm-stats.com
Anthropic
Claude 3 Opus
Input tokens$15.00
Output tokens$75.00
Best providerAnthropic
Mistral AI
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Input tokens$0.07
Output tokens$0.14
Best providerDeepinfra
Notice missing or incorrect data?Start an Issue→

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Claude 3 Opus accepts 200,000 input tokens compared to Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct's 32,000 tokens. Claude 3 Opus can generate longer responses up to 200,000 tokens, while Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is limited to 32,000 tokens.

Anthropic
Claude 3 Opus
Input200,000 tokens
Output200,000 tokens
Mistral AI
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Input32,000 tokens
Output32,000 tokens
Mon Sep 07 2026 • llm-stats.com

Input capabilities

Documented input modalities across available providers

Claude 3 Opus supports multimodal inputs, whereas Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct 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

Text
Images
Audio
Video

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

Text
Images
Audio
Video

License

Usage and distribution terms

Claude 3 Opus is licensed under a proprietary license, while Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct uses Apache 2.0.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

Claude 3 Opus

Proprietary

Closed source

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Claude 3 Opus was released on 2024-02-29, while Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct was released on 2025-01-30.

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is 11 months newer than Claude 3 Opus.

Claude 3 Opus

Feb 29, 2024

2.5 years ago

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

Jan 30, 2025

1.6 years ago

11mo newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct has a documented knowledge cutoff of 2023-10-01, while Claude 3 Opus's cutoff date is not specified.

We can confirm Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct's training data extends to 2023-10-01, but cannot make a direct comparison without Claude 3 Opus's cutoff date.

Claude 3 Opus

—

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

Oct 2023

Provider Availability

Claude 3 Opus is available from Anthropic, Bedrock, Google. Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is available from DeepInfra, Mistral AI.

Claude 3 Opus

anthropic logo
Anthropic
Input Price:Input: $15.00/1MOutput Price:Output: $75.00/1M
bedrock logo
AWS Bedrock
Input Price:Input: $15.00/1MOutput Price:Output: $75.00/1M
google logo
Google
Input Price:Input: $15.00/1MOutput Price:Output: $75.00/1M

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct

deepinfra logo
Deepinfra
Input Price:Input: $0.07/1MOutput Price:Output: $0.14/1M
mistral logo
Mistral
Input Price:Input: $0.10/1MOutput Price:Output: $0.30/1M
* Prices shown are per million tokens

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?Start an Issue discussion→

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Claude 3 Opus
✓ Preferred
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct.

Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct are closely matched on the LLM Stats Score at 10.0 and 4.4. Claude 3 Opus is made by Anthropic and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is made by Mistral AI. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Claude 3 Opus compare to Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct in benchmarks?

Claude 3 Opus scores ARC-C: 96.4%, HellaSwag: 95.4%, GSM8k: 95.0%, MGSM: 90.7%, BIG-Bench Hard: 86.8%. Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct scores Arena Hard: 87.6%, HumanEval: 84.8%, MT-Bench: 83.5%, IFEval: 82.9%, MATH: 70.6%.

Is Claude 3 Opus cheaper than Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct?

Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is 214.3x cheaper for input tokens. Claude 3 Opus costs $15.00/M input and $75.00/M output via anthropic. Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct costs $0.07/M input and $0.14/M output via deepinfra.

What are the context window sizes for Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus supports 200K tokens and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct supports 32K tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (10.0 vs 4.4), context window (200K vs 32K), input pricing ($15.00 vs $0.07/M), multimodal support (yes vs no), licensing (Proprietary vs Apache 2.0). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus is developed by Anthropic and Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct is developed by Mistral AI.

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