Compare · updated 2026-11-01

Claude Opus vs Mistral Large

Claude Opus is better at quick answers, writing, coding, reasoning, maths, translation; Mistral Large is better at structured data, long documents. Mistral Large is the cheaper of the two on output.

Measured quality by task

Quality is Nivana’s measured score for each kind of task, from weekly pairwise evals judged by models from several labs. Prices are live AI Gateway list prices per million tokens. Updated 2026-11-01. How this is measured.

Price and context

Which should you use?

Use the one that wins the kind of work you do most, unless the price gap outweighs the quality gap for easy requests. Or don’t choose: Nivana scores both, and the rest of the pool, on every request and sends it to whichever is best for that request.

Questions

Is Claude Opus better than Mistral Large?

On Nivana’s weekly evals Claude Opus scores higher on 6 of 8 task types (quick answers, writing, coding, reasoning, maths, translation) and Mistral Large on 2 (structured data, long documents). Neither is better at everything.

Which is better for coding, Claude Opus or Mistral Large?

Claude Opus: 98/100 against 78/100 for Mistral Large on Nivana’s coding evals.

Which is better for writing, Claude Opus or Mistral Large?

Claude Opus: 94/100 against 84/100 for Mistral Large on Nivana’s writing evals.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus or Mistral Large?

Mistral Large: $2.1 per million output tokens against $20 for Claude Opus, about 9.5× less. A typical chat answer costs about $0.0025 on Mistral Large and $0.020 on Claude Opus.