// head_to_head
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Carbon
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Effectively the same quality — Gemini 4 Carbon is the cheaper way to get it.
The two are within 0.1 points overall, which is inside the range that effort settings alone move a LiveBench score, so treat them as quality-equivalent. Gemini 4 Carbon lists 2.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. When quality ties, cost is the whole decision. Gemini 4 Carbon also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0202 per point.
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Claude Opus 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $8.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 22, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.4
Gemini 4 Carbon
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Nov 10, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.5
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 5.5 | Gemini 4 Carbon |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 83.4 | 83.5 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0672 | $0.0202win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $8.00 | $4.00win |
| Input price / 1M | $4.00 | $2.00win |
| Output price / 1M | $20.00 | $10.00win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | $0.100win |
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 944Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 5.5 on top, Gemini 4 Carbon below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 5.5 | Gemini 4 Carbon |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2,286/mo | $1,143/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $2,880/mo | $1,440/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $2,672/mo | $1,336/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $5,310/mo | $2,655/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $10,100/mo | $5,050/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Gemini 4 Carbon
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.0202 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Carbon FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Gemini 4 Carbon?
Effectively the same quality — Gemini 4 Carbon is the cheaper way to get it. The two are within 0.1 points overall, which is inside the range that effort settings alone move a LiveBench score, so treat them as quality-equivalent. Gemini 4 Carbon lists 2.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. When quality ties, cost is the whole decision. Gemini 4 Carbon also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0202 per point.
Is Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than Gemini 4 Carbon?
Gemini 4 Carbon is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 5.5 lists at $8.00 per million tokens and Gemini 4 Carbon at $4.00 — Gemini 4 Carbon is 2.0× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4.00 in and $20.00 out, Gemini 4 Carbon charges $2.00 and $10.00 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Carbon: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores 83.4 and Gemini 4 Carbon scores 83.5 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That gap is inside the range that effort settings alone move a score, so treat them as equivalent on published quality. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 5.5 or Gemini 4 Carbon?
Gemini 4 Carbon. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Opus 5.5 works out at $0.0672 per point and Gemini 4 Carbon at $0.0202.
Does Claude Opus 5.5 or Gemini 4 Carbon have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Opus 5.5 and 1.0M for Gemini 4 Carbon.
Do Claude Opus 5.5 and Gemini 4 Carbon support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.200 per million for Claude Opus 5.5 and $0.100 for Gemini 4 Carbon, against full input rates of $4.00 and $2.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-11-06, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.