Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Sonnet 5 passed more tasks on the AIGROW small-business benchmark and Mistral Medium 3.5 has the lower list price, so pick Claude Sonnet 5 for accuracy and Mistral Medium 3.5 for cost. Mistral Medium 3.5 passed 8 of 20 tasks and costs $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million tokens; Claude Sonnet 5 passed 17 and costs $2 in and $10 out.
AIGROW credit covers Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.2, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 4 Argon. Claude Sonnet 5.5 below list price
$25 a month brings $110 of API credit and cancels any time; $25 once buys $100. For long documents, Claude Sonnet 5 reads up to 1M tokens at once and Mistral Medium 3.5 up to 256K. US dollars, standard rate, shortest context band. Cost per pass from the AIGROW small-business benchmark. Newer comparison: Mistral Large 4 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- $7.40
- Tasks passed
- 8 of 20
- Claude Sonnet 5
- $6.70
- Tasks passed
- 17 of 20
AIGROW small-business benchmark, failed runs included.
The European option against Anthropic's previous workhorse, for buyers who care where their data is processed. Claude Sonnet 5 costs $6.70 per 1,000 passing answers on the AIGROW small-business benchmark, Mistral Medium 3.5 $7.40. 1,000 support replies cost $10.00 on Claude Sonnet 5 and $7.50 on Mistral Medium 3.5, so Claude Sonnet 5 costs 33% more.
What each one costs
The API price per million tokens and the cheapest app plan with each model, from the makers’ own pages. Each name opens that model’s full price page.
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- On the Mistral API, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Vibe has a free plan and paid plans from $14.99/mo (Pro); the plan list does not name Mistral Medium 3.5. Plan prices read 22 October 2026.
- Claude Sonnet 5
- On the Anthropic API, Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Side by side
Each maker’s published rate for its standard tier. Cached input is what a repeated prompt prefix costs once the provider has stored it.
| Fact | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Mistral | Anthropic |
| Tier | Workhorses | Workhorses |
| Input, per M tokens | $1.50 | $2.00 |
| Output, per M tokens | $7.50 | $10.00 |
| Cached input | $0.15 | $0.20 |
| Context window | 256K | 1M |
| Released | 28 Apr 2026 | 30 Jun 2026 |
| Weights | Open weights | Closed weights |
What a job costs on each
1,000 runs of each job at the two list prices. The gap moves from job to job because the models price input, output and cached context differently.
| Job | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $7.50 | $10.00 | Mistral Medium 3.5, 25% less |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $45.00 | $60.00 | Mistral Medium 3.5, 25% less |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $48.00 | $64.00 | Mistral Medium 3.5, 25% less |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are the makers’. A model with no published cache price bills the agent task’s repeated context at its full input rate.
The small print
What each base rate leaves out, from the makers’ own pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- Mistral deprecated it on 31 October 2026 and removed it from its pricing page, so these are the last prices it published, read 2026-10-15. It shuts down on 30 April 2027 and Mistral recommends Mistral Large 4 for new integrations. Open weights under a modified MIT license. Mistral’s pricing page
- Claude Sonnet 5
- Legacy model, still available; the current Sonnet is Claude Sonnet 5.5. The introductory $2 / $10 price became the standard price; the planned rise to $3 / $15 was cancelled. Cache write $2.50 (5 min) or $4 (1 h). Batch API 50% off. US-only inference bills 1.1x. Full context window billed at standard rates. Anthropic’s pricing page
Other comparisons
Every head to head on the list that involves Mistral Medium 3.5 or Claude Sonnet 5.
Compare Mistral Medium 3.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 with 52 other models
The price list sets every model’s input and output price side by side, with what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost on each.
Prices checked 12 November 2026