ModelRefs / Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Mistral Small 3.1
Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Mistral Small 3.1
Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Mistral Small 3.1: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Claude 3.5 Sonnet is Anthropic's mid-2024 balanced model, the release that introduced computer use and anchored Anthropic's agentic-coding positioning for its generation across a 200,000-token context window. It is now retired: Anthropic deprecated both the claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620 and claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022 snapshots on 13 August 2025 and retired them on 28 October 2025 on Anthropic-operated platforms, naming Claude Sonnet 5.5 as the replacement.
Mistral Small 3.1: Mistral Small 3.1 is Mistral AI's 24-billion-parameter multimodal model, accepting text and image input across a context window of up to 128,000 tokens and published under Apache 2.0. Mistral reports inference speeds of 150 tokens per second and compares it with Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini in the same weight class. Its size and licence make it one of the larger models that remains practical to self-host on a single machine.
Context window: Claude 3.5 Sonnet accepts up to 200,000 tokens, Mistral Small 3.1 up to 128,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Mistral Small 3.1 at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Released | 2024-06-20 | 2025-03-17 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Input price | $3/M tokens | $0.1/M tokens |
| Output price | $15/M tokens | $0.3/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | Yes, open weights |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
Where they differ most
- Cost Efficiency: Claude 3.5 Sonnet 37%, Mistral Small 3.1 95%. Mistral Small 3.1 leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Mistral Small 3.1.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Mistral Small 3.1?
Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Mistral Small 3.1 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3.5 Sonnet cheaper than Mistral Small 3.1?
Compare $0.00300 vs $0.00010 on this page.