Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Mistral Medium 3.5
Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Mistral Medium 3.5 by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)
Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 65.2% less intelligence, 103.1% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 197.2% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 40.8 | 14.2 | −65.2% Mistral Medium 3.5 is 65.2% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $622.28 | $1,263.80 | +103.1% Mistral Medium 3.5 is 2.0× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 5.98s | 17.77s | +197.2% Mistral Medium 3.5 is 197.2% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $2.00 / $10.0 | $1.50 / $7.50 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Mistral Medium 3.5Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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