Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) vs Mistral Small 3.1

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Mistral Small 3.1 by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 56.00
Total cost: $7260

MistralMistral Small 3.1Off the frontier

Intelligence: 7.10
Total cost: $27.8

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… scores 48.9 points higher (56.0 vs 7.1) but costs 261× as much to run the benchmark ($7260 vs $27.8; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… when you need intelligence above 7.1, and Mistral Small 3.1 when 7.1 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)	Mistral Small 3.1	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	56.0	7.1	−87.3% Mistral Small 3.1 is 87.3% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$7,259.50	$27.82	−99.6% Mistral Small 3.1 is 99.6% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	380.92s	11.25s	−97.0% Mistral Small 3.1 is 97.0% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.08 / $0.14
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Mistral Small 3.1 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): 87.3% less intelligence, 99.6% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 97.0% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): what beats it Mistral Small 3.1: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Mistral Small 3.1 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Mistral Small 3.1Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5/mistral-small-3-1 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5/mistral-small-3-1?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill