Model comparison 2026

Claude Opus 5.5 vs Codestral

Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic · Frontier · Proprietary
$8.80/1M · 1M ctx
Codestral
Mistral · Budget · Proprietary
$0.48/1M · 256K ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Opus 5.5
Codestral
Maker
Anthropic
Mistral
Blended price / 1M
$8.80
$0.48
Input / output
$4.00 in · $20 out / 1M tokens
$0.30 in · $0.90 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
256K
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
No
Output Quality
10.0
6.8
Agentic Ability
10.0
6.5
Speed
7.6
9.5
Value for money
7.4
8.9
Reliability
9.5
8.8

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Opus 5.5 or Codestral?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Opus 5.5 if you want the hardest coding and agent work, as the default flagship instead of Fable. Choose Codestral if you want fast completions and lightweight code edits.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Codestral leads in 2. On price, Claude Opus 5.5 runs about $8.80 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Codestral is about $0.48 and proprietary.

Where Opus 5.5 falls short
  • Twice Sonnet 5.5's price per token for a small measured gain
  • Released September 2026, so its long-run track record is still short
Full Opus 5.5 breakdown →
Where Codestral falls short
  • Not for deep agentic planning
  • Quality below the larger coders
Full Codestral breakdown →

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