Claude vs Gemini
Two product families, side by side — subscriptions, API pricing, and which one to reach for.
The short answer
Claude leads on raw capability — its strongest model, Claude Fable 5, posts the higher combined coding and reasoning score in this comparison. Gemini is the cheaper way in: Gemini 2.0 Flash blends to $0.19 per million tokens, which is what matters once you are running volume rather than evaluating. Gemini offers the wider context window at 2M 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
- 5
- 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
- 4
- Max context
- 2M
Subscriptions
What Claude and Gemini charge a person per month.
The paid tiers land at $20/month for Claude and $20/month for Gemini. At that price the deciding factor is rarely raw intelligence — both clear 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/mo
- Claude Max$100/mo
Gemini
- Gemini FreeFree
- Gemini Pro$20/mo
Plan prices last verified 2026-07-21.
API pricing, tier by tier
Claude and Gemini line-ups matched by capability tier.
| Tier | Claude | Gemini |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship | Claude Fable 5$10.00 / $50.00 per 1M in / out | — |
| Mid-range | Claude Sonnet 5$3.00 / $15.00 per 1M in / out | Gemini 3.1 Pro$2.00 / $12.00 per 1M in / out |
| Budget | Claude Haiku 4.5$1.00 / $5.00 per 1M in / out | Gemini 2.0 Flash$0.10 / $0.40 per 1M in / out |
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — the cheapest option from Claude (Claude Haiku 4.5) runs about $20.00, against roughly $1.80 for Gemini's Gemini 2.0 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.
- For high-volume production where cost dominates: Gemini, specifically Gemini 2.0 Flash at $0.19 blended per million tokens.
- For whole-repository or long-document work: Gemini, with up to 2M 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.