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Mistral Medium 3 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
A detailed comparison of Mistral Medium 3 (Mistral) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) across pricing, performance, and features.
Pricing Comparison
| Metric | Mistral Medium 3 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.40 | $3.00 | +650% |
| Output / 1M tokens | $2.00 | $15.00 | +650% |
| Context window | 128K | 200K | — |
| Max output | 16.384K | 16K | — |
Benchmark Comparison
| Benchmark | Mistral Medium 3 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 76% | 86% |
| HumanEval | 87% | 94% |
| GPQA | — | 70% |
Capabilities
| Capability | Mistral Medium 3 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| code | ✓ | ✓ |
| reasoning | ✗ | ✓ |
| text | ✓ | ✓ |
| tool-use | ✓ | ✓ |
| vision | ✓ | ✓ |
Mistral Medium 3 Strengths
- ✓Very affordable for mid-tier quality
- ✓Good multilingual performance
Mistral Medium 3 Weaknesses
- ✗Lags behind on reasoning benchmarks
- ✗Smaller community and tooling
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Strengths
- ✓Opus 4.5 quality at 1/5th the cost
- ✓Best value for production workloads
- ✓1M context in beta
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Weaknesses
- ✗Long context pricing doubles above 200K
- ✗Slightly below Opus 4.6 on hardest tasks
Quick Verdict
Best value: Mistral Medium 3 is the more affordable option at $0.4/$2 per 1M tokens.
Higher benchmarks: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher on average across available benchmarks (83.3% avg).
Larger context: Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports 200K tokens.
Choose Mistral Medium 3 if cost matters most. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need the best possible quality for complex tasks.