LV
LLMversus

Claude Opus 4 vs Mistral Small: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Mistral Small is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. Claude Opus 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1360 vs 1160. Mistral Small is faster at 120 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1185. Claude Opus 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4Mistral Small
ProviderAnthropicMistral
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.100
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$0.300
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens32,0008,192
Arena ELO1,3301,185
Coding ELO1,3601,160
TTFT (ms)500160
Tokens/sec50120
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Choose Claude Opus 4 when you need: top-tier coding and reasoning, excellent agentic capabilities, strong instruction following, 200k context window. It excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use Mistral Small

Choose Mistral Small when you need: very affordable pricing, fast inference speed, good multilingual support, suitable for lightweight tasks. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, multilingual tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very affordable pricing
  • Fast inference speed
  • Good multilingual support
  • Suitable for lightweight tasks

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivemultilingual

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons

Claude Opus 4 vs O4 MiniMistral Small vs O4 MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Gemini 2 5 ProGemini 2 5 Pro vs Mistral SmallClaude Opus 4 vs Deepseek R1Claude Opus 4 vs O3 MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Grok 3Claude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4 1Claude Opus 4 vs Llama 4 MaverickClaude Opus 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4Claude Opus 4 vs Deepseek V3Claude Opus 4 vs Gemini 2 0 FlashClaude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4oClaude Opus 4 vs Qwen 2 5 MaxClaude Opus 4 vs Llama 4 ScoutClaude Opus 4 vs Mistral LargeClaude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4 1 MiniClaude Haiku 4 vs Claude Opus 4Claude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4o MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Grok 3 Mini