Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

Claude Opus 4.8 versus Mistral Medium 3.5 specifications and price.
metric	Claude Opus 4.8	Mistral Medium 3.5
Input / 1M	$5.00	$1.50
Output / 1M	$25.00	$7.50
Context	1M	262K
Cost @ typical workload	$4,000/mo	$1,200/mo
Modality	text + image	text + image
Price source	list	list
Provider	Anthropic	Mistral

Which should you pick?

On a typical workload, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1,200/mo against Claude Opus 4.8's $4,000/mo — roughly 3.3× cheaper. But the ranking depends on your output-to-input ratio: output is the pricier direction for both, so an output-heavy job (code generation, long answers) widens the gap while an input-heavy one (summarization, retrieval) narrows it. If you need to fit more in a single prompt, Claude Opus 4.8 has the larger 1M-token window (~1,500 pages).

These are list and routed market prices, not measured outcomes. Two models at the same rate can still cost different amounts to finish the same task, because verbose or reasoning-heavy models emit more tokens. That gap is exactly what measured cost-per-task captures.

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Medium 3.5 cheaper?

For a typical workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens × 200,000 requests/month), Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1,200/mo versus $4,000/mo for Claude Opus 4.8 — about 3.3× less. Because output is priced higher than input, the winner can flip if your workload writes much more or less than this; check your own numbers in the calculator.

What's the main difference between Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Medium 3.5?

On price, Claude Opus 4.8 is $5.00/$25.00 per 1M (in/out) and Mistral Medium 3.5 is $1.50/$7.50. Claude Opus 4.8 has the larger context window at 1M tokens.

More comparisons

Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Medium 3.5 — full specs and price history.
API cost calculator — compare on your own workload.
All comparisons — the full head-to-head index.