ANTHROPIC VS MISTRAL
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Magistral Medium
Magistral Medium is about 3.6x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 on a blended 3:1 input:output rate — the same 10K-in/2K-out request costs $0.03 vs $0.10. Claude Opus 4.8 has the larger context window (1,000,000 vs 128,000 tokens).
Pricing verified
API pricing per 1M tokens
| Model | Input / 1M tokens | Output / 1M tokens | Blended (3:1 mix) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $10.00 |
| Magistral Medium | $2.00 | $5.00 | $2.75 |
Rates from official Anthropic pricing and official Mistral pricing, checked 2026-08-11.
What a real workload costs
Example: one request with 10,000 input tokens and 2,000 output tokens, then that request at 100,000 runs per month.
| Model | Per request (10K in / 2K out) | Per month (100K requests) | Monthly delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $0.10 | $10,000 | +$7,000 |
| Magistral Medium | $0.03 | $3,000 | — |
Model your own prompt sizes and volumes in the token cost analyzer, or check caching savings with the prompt caching calculator.
Specs side by side
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.8 | Magistral Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Model class | Reasoning | Reasoning |
| Tokenizer | Proprietary (counts estimated) | Proprietary (counts estimated) |
Count tokens for each model on its own page: Claude Opus 4.8 token counter and Magistral Medium token counter. All Anthropic models are on the Claude Token Counter. All Mistral models are on the Mistral Token Counter.
FAQ
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Magistral Medium FAQ
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Magistral Medium?
Magistral Medium is cheaper. At rates checked 2026-08-11, Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5.00 input / $25.00 output per 1M tokens, while Magistral Medium costs $2.00 input / $5.00 output — about a 3.6x difference on a typical 3:1 input-heavy workload.
How much does a real request cost on Claude Opus 4.8 vs Magistral Medium?
A request with 10,000 input tokens and 2,000 output tokens costs about $0.10 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $0.03 on Magistral Medium. At 100,000 such requests per month that is $10,000 vs $3,000 — a difference of $7,000 per month.
Which has the bigger context window, Claude Opus 4.8 or Magistral Medium?
Claude Opus 4.8. It supports 1,000,000 tokens of context versus 128,000 tokens — roughly 750,000 English words in one request.
Do Claude Opus 4.8 and Magistral Medium count tokens the same way?
Not exactly. Claude Opus 4.8 uses a proprietary tokenizer (counts are estimates) and Magistral Medium uses a proprietary tokenizer (counts are estimates). The same prompt will tokenize differently, which shifts effective cost per word.