Model comparison
Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Anthropic against Google, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.
Catalog record checked August 14, 2026; individual provider fields may change.
Anthropic
Claude Opus 5
Frontier
Gemini 3.6 Flash
Budget
| Specification | Claude Opus 5 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | |
| Tier | Frontier | Budget |
| Context window | 1M | Winner: 1.05M |
| Max output | Winner: 128K | 66K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $5 | Winner: $0.75 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25 | Winner: $3.75 |
| Weights | Closed | Closed |
| Parameters | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Reasoning levels | low, medium, high, xhigh, max | minimal, low, medium, high |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image, video, audio, pdf |
| Released | July 24, 2026 | July 21, 2026 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index [max] (2026-08-14) | Winner: 63 | 52 |
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.
Pricing tiers: Gemini 3.6 Flash: Introductory paid-tier rates through 2026-12-31. From 2027-01-01 the standard paid rates are $1.50 / $7.50 per million tokens (Gemini API pricing). Cache is $0.075 / MTok through 2026-12-31, then $0.15. Wire calls to `gemini-3.6-flash`. Thinking levels are `minimal` / `low` / `medium` / `high` (API default medium).
Claude Opus 5
Anthropic's frontier tier, and ahead of Fable 5 on both recorded benchmarks at half the price.
Best for
- Agentic coding
- Long-context analysis
- Multi-step engineering work
Watch out
Output tokens cost five times input — long generations dominate the bill.
Gemini 3.6 Flash
Google's July 2026 Flash tier for multimodal volume work; 3.7 Flash is the newer coding/agent workhorse at the same introductory rate.
Best for
- Multimodal pipelines
- High-volume processing
- Video and audio input
Watch out
Introductory $0.75 input is 3.75× Luna; the $1.50 rate returns on 2027-01-01. 66K max output (65,536 tokens) is roughly half Luna's. Prefer 3.7 Flash for new coding-agent work unless you are pinned to 3.6.
Benchmark
DeepSWE 1.1 in context
Both models shown against the wider field, with cost per completed task alongside the score.
Local leader
Claude Opus 5 [max]
74%
Rows shown
24
Highest published reasoning effort per model (not best Pass@1)
Snapshot date
2026-08-13
Mirrored from deepswe.datacurve.ai
Better is toward the top-right (higher pass rate, lower cost). X-axis is reversed to match DeepSWE’s public chart. v1.1 uses average cost / tokens / steps; v1 uses published medians.
| # | Model | Pass@1 | Cost / task | Tokens / task | Steps / task |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 5 [max] | 74% | $11.84 | 118k | 99 |
| 2 | GPT-5.6 Sol [max] | 73% | $8.39 | 60k | 61 |
| 3 | Claude Fable 5 [max] | 70% | $21.63 | 119k | 88 |
| 4 | GPT-5.6 Terra [max] | 70% | $4.95 | 72k | 76 |
| 5 | Kimi K3 [max] | 69% | $4.65 | 82k | 98 |
| 6 | GPT-5.6 Luna [max] | 67% | $3.03 | 73k | 102 |
| 7 | GPT-5.5 [xhigh] | 67% | $7.23 | 46k | 82 |
| 8 | Grok 4.6 [xhigh] | 67% | $5.50 | 71k | 87 |
| 9 | Gemini 3.7 Flash [high] | 65% | $2.18 | 107k | 125 |
| 10 | DeepSeek V4-Pro [max] | 63% | $0.24 | 106k | 155 |
| 11 | Claude Opus 4.8 [max] | 59% | $13.22 | 135k | 120 |
| 12 | Qwen3.8-Max [xhigh] | 58% | $3.73 | 95k | 111 |
| 13 | Muse Spark 1.2 [xhigh] | 55% | $3.70 | 99k | 101 |
| 14 | Claude Sonnet 5 [max] | 54% | $26.40 | 214k | 268 |
| 15 | Grok 4.5 [high] | 54% | $2.42 | 36k | 61 |
| 16 | DeepSeek V4-Flash [max] | 53% | $0.10 | 108k | 153 |
| 17 | Muse Spark 1.1 [xhigh] | 53% | $2.36 | 74k | 96 |
| 18 | GPT-5.4 [xhigh] | 52% | $5.65 | 71k | 70 |
| 19 | Gemini 3.6 Flash [high] | 47% | $4.42 | 96k | 117 |
| 20 | GLM 5.2 [max] | 44% | $3.92 | 78k | 129 |
| 21 | Gemini 3.5 Flash [high] | 36% | $3.45 | 76k | 105 |
| 22 | Kimi K2.7 Code | 31% | $2.82 | 59k | 149 |
| 23 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 [high] | 30% | $5.52 | 76k | 134 |
| 24 | Gemini 3.1 Pro [high] | 12% | $2.14 | 28k | 76 |
DeepSWE “Best” picks the highest published reasoning effort per model (not the highest pass rate). Small gaps may not be statistically meaningful — confirm on deepswe.datacurve.ai.
Common questions
Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.
Is Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash cheaper for input?
Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper at $0.75 per million input tokens, against $5 for Claude Opus 5 — roughly 6.7× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Gemini 3.6 Flash has tiered pricing: Introductory paid-tier rates through 2026-12-31. From 2027-01-01 the standard paid rates are $1.50 / $7.50 per million tokens (Gemini API pricing). Cache is $0.075 / MTok through 2026-12-31, then $0.15. Wire calls to `gemini-3.6-flash`. Thinking levels are `minimal` / `low` / `medium` / `high` (API default medium).
Is Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash cheaper for output?
Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper at $3.75 per million output tokens, against $25 for Claude Opus 5 — roughly 6.7× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Gemini 3.6 Flash has tiered pricing: Introductory paid-tier rates through 2026-12-31. From 2027-01-01 the standard paid rates are $1.50 / $7.50 per million tokens (Gemini API pricing). Cache is $0.075 / MTok through 2026-12-31, then $0.15. Wire calls to `gemini-3.6-flash`. Thinking levels are `minimal` / `low` / `medium` / `high` (API default medium).
Which has the larger context window, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts 1.05M tokens against 1M for Claude Opus 5. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.
Do Claude Opus 5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash support the same reasoning levels?
Claude Opus 5 exposes low, medium, high, xhigh, max, while Gemini 3.6 Flash exposes minimal, low, medium, high.
Should I use Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Claude Opus 5 is the frontier tier and Gemini 3.6 Flash the budget tier. The useful question is whether your hardest task actually fails on the cheaper one — most production volume such as classification, extraction and summarisation does not.
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.