Brand comparison
Claude vs Gemini
The short answer
Claude leads on raw capability — its strongest model, Claude Fable 5.1, posts the higher combined coding and reasoning score in this comparison. Claude is the cheaper way in: Claude Haiku 5.5 blends to $0.22 per million tokens, which is what matters once you are running volume rather than evaluating. Gemini offers the wider context window at 1.05M tokens. Most teams end up using both — one for the hard problems, one for everything else.
Claude
Anthropic's assistant, favoured for long-document work, writing quality, and agentic coding. The API family runs from an always-thinking frontier model down to a fast extraction tier, with a 1M context window across the current generation.
- API models
- 10
- Max context
- 1M
Gemini
Google's assistant, tied into Workspace and Search. Competitive on scientific reasoning benchmarks and priced aggressively at the mid tier, with long-context pricing that steps up past 200K tokens.
- API models
- 6
- Max context
- 1.05M
Subscriptions
What Claude and Gemini charge a person per month.
Paid plans start at $20.00/month for Claude and $4.99/month for Gemini. Past that entry price the deciding factor is rarely raw intelligence — every paid tier clears the bar for everyday work. It is the surrounding features and the usage ceiling that differ, so pick on what you actually hit limits doing.
Claude
- Claude FreeFree
- Claude Pro$20.00/mo
- Claude Max$100.00/mo
Gemini
- Gemini FreeFree
- Google AI Plus$4.99/mo
- Google AI Pro$19.99/mo
Plan prices last verified October 9, 2026.
API pricing, tier by tier
Claude and Gemini line-ups matched by capability tier.
| Tier | Claude | Gemini |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship | Claude Fable 5.1$10.00 / $50.00 per 1M in / out | — |
| Mid-range | Claude Sonnet 5.5$2.00 / $10.00 per 1M in / out | Gemini 3.1 Pro$2.00 / $12.00 per 1M in / out |
| Budget | Claude Haiku 5.5$0.10 / $0.50 per 1M in / out | Gemini 3.8 Flash$0.75 / $3.75 per 1M in / out |
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — the cheapest option from Claude (Claude Haiku 5.5) runs about $2.00, against roughly $15.00 for Gemini's Gemini 3.8 Flash. Run your own numbers on the calculator before committing: the mix of input to output tokens moves this more than the headline price does.
Which one to pick
- For the hardest reasoning and long agentic runs: Claude, specifically Claude Fable 5.1.
- For high-volume production where cost dominates: Claude, specifically Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.22 blended per million tokens.
- For whole-repository or long-document work: Gemini, with up to 1.05M tokens of context.
Model-level comparisons
The brand answer is a summary. These pages compare the specific Claude and Gemini models against each other with full benchmark and cost breakdowns.