Model comparison
Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
Anthropic against Google, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.
Catalog record checked August 6, 2026; individual provider fields may change.
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
Budget
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
Budget
| Specification | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | |
| Tier | Budget | Budget |
| Context window | 200K | Winner: 1.05M |
| Max output | 64K | Winner: 66K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1 | Winner: $0.30 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5 | Winner: $2.50 |
| Weights | Closed | Closed |
| Parameters | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Reasoning levels | Not verified | Not verified |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image, video, audio, pdf |
| Released | October 15, 2025 | July 21, 2026 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-08) | 24 | Winner: 37 |
Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic's cheapest tier for high-volume classification and routine extraction.
Best for
- High-volume classification
- Routine extraction
- Cost-sensitive Anthropic stacks
Watch out
A generation behind the 5-series models it sits alongside in the lineup.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
Google's cheapest current Flash-class API tier for high-volume, latency-sensitive agent loops.
Best for
- High-volume agents
- Document pipelines
- Cost-sensitive multimodal work
Watch out
Cheaper than 3.6 and 3.7 Flash, not stronger on hard reasoning — pick it for throughput, not frontier coding.
Common questions
Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.
Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite cheaper for input?
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper at $0.30 per million input tokens, against $1 for Claude Haiku 4.5 — roughly 3.3× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate.
Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite cheaper for output?
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper at $2.50 per million output tokens, against $5 for Claude Haiku 4.5 — roughly 2.0× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Haiku 4.5 or Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite?
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite accepts 1.05M tokens against 200K for Claude Haiku 4.5. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.
Should I use Claude Haiku 4.5 or Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite?
Both sit in the budget tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. Claude Haiku 4.5 suits high-volume classification; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite suits high-volume agents.
Next step
Choosing between them
Tier and workload decide this more reliably than a leaderboard position does.
If both sit in the same tier, the decision usually comes down to context window and output price rather than headline capability — output tokens dominate real bills.
If one is a step up within the same provider, the useful question is whether your hardest task actually fails on the cheaper tier. Most production volume — classification, extraction, summarization — does not.
Choosing a harness rather than a model — Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Muse Code, or Lovable? Compare agentic harnesses · Latest releases.