Claude Opus 4 8 ThinkingvsMistral Small 2506
Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking leads the overall Podium Score by 6.0 points (74.0 vs 68.0).Category wins: Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking 0 — 0 Mistral Small 2506.Mistral Small 2506 is the cheaper pick ($6/M vs $15/M per 1M output tokens). Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking is faster (50 t/s vs 50 t/s).
Key VerdictAggregated 2026 Benchmark Analysis
Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking is rated higher overall with a Podium Score of 74.0 (vs 68.0 for Mistral Small 2506). Both models show closely matched capabilities across domain benchmarks.
Coding & Engineering
Comparable
Inference Speed
Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking (50 t/s)
Cost Efficiency
Mistral Small 2506 ($6/M/M)
| Metric | Claude Opus 4 8 Thinking | Mistral Small 2506 |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Score | 74.0 ▲ | 68.0 |
| Arena Elo | — | — |
| Intelligence Index | — | — |
| Coding | — | — |
| Math | — | — |
| Reasoning | — | — |
| Agentic | — | — |
| Knowledge | — | — |
| Multimodal | — | — |
| Long-context | — | — |
| Output speed | 50 t/s | 50 t/s |
| Output price | $15/M | $6/M ▲ |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
Scores aggregated from five independent leaderboards. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Claude Opus 4 8 T vs Claude Mythos · Claude Opus 4 8 T vs Claude Fable 5 · Claude Opus 4 8 T vs Kimi K3 · Claude Opus 4 8 T vs Claude Opus 5