// head_to_head
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Mistral Small 3.1 24B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Mistral Small 3.1 24B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
anthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $8.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 22, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.2
mistralai
Mistral Small 3.1 24B
- Blended / 1M
- $0.402
- Context
- 128K
- Released
- Mar 17, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 5.5 | Mistral Small 3.1 24B |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 83.2 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.4474 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $8.00 | $0.402win |
| Input price / 1M | $4.00 | $0.351win |
| Output price / 1M | $20.00 | $0.555win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | — |
| Context window | 1Mwin | 128K |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 102K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 5.5 on top, Mistral Small 3.1 24B below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 5.5 | Mistral Small 3.1 24B |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2,286/mo | $128.64/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $2,880/mo | $314.10/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $2,672/mo | $325.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $5,310/mo | $392.62/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $10,100/mo | $933.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
Claude Opus 5.5
Wider context window — 1M against 128K.
You are cost-constrained
Mistral Small 3.1 24B
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.402 per million tokens.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Mistral Small 3.1 24B?
Mistral Small 3.1 24B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Mistral Small 3.1 24B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Is Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than Mistral Small 3.1 24B?
Mistral Small 3.1 24B is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 5.5 lists at $8.00 per million tokens and Mistral Small 3.1 24B at $0.402 — Mistral Small 3.1 24B is 20× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4.00 in and $20.00 out, Mistral Small 3.1 24B charges $0.351 and $0.555 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does Claude Opus 5.5 or Mistral Small 3.1 24B have a bigger context window?
Claude Opus 5.5 has the larger context window: 1M for Claude Opus 5.5 against 128K for Mistral Small 3.1 24B. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Claude Opus 5.5 and Mistral Small 3.1 24B support prompt caching?
Claude Opus 5.5 publishes a cached-input rate of $0.200 per million tokens against a full input rate of $4.00. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Mistral Small 3.1 24B, which means the provider does not price it separately here — not that caching is unavailable.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.