// head_to_head
Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
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.
Claude Opus 5 scores higher, Gemini 3.6 Flash costs less — it depends on your workload.
Claude Opus 5 is ahead by 6.5 points overall, and Gemini 3.6 Flash lists 6.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 6.5 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Gemini 3.6 Flash also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.1327 per point.
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Claude Opus 5
- Blended / 1M
- $10.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Jul 24, 2026
- Overall score
- 80.1
Gemini 3.6 Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $1.50
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Jul 21, 2026
- Overall score
- 73.6
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 80.1win | 73.6 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.3950 | $0.1327win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $10.00 | $1.50win |
| Input price / 1M | $5.00 | $0.750win |
| Output price / 1M | $25.00 | $3.75win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.500 | $0.075win |
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 128Kwin | 66K |
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 on top, Gemini 3.6 Flash 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 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2876.00/mo | $431.40/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $3700.00/mo | $555.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $3480.00/mo | $522.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $6650.00/mo | $997.50/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $12,750/mo | $1912.50/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Gemini 3.6 Flash
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.1327 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Opus 5
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 80.1.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Claude Opus 5
Leads on agentic coding — 65.2 against 43.4.
Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Claude Opus 5 scores higher, Gemini 3.6 Flash costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Opus 5 is ahead by 6.5 points overall, and Gemini 3.6 Flash lists 6.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 6.5 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Gemini 3.6 Flash also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.1327 per point.
Is Claude Opus 5 cheaper than Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 5 lists at $10.00 per million tokens and Gemini 3.6 Flash at $1.50 — Gemini 3.6 Flash is 6.7× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 5 charges $5.00 in and $25.00 out, Gemini 3.6 Flash charges $0.750 and $3.75 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 5 scores 80.1 and Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 73.6 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 6.5-point lead for Claude Opus 5. 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 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash. 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 works out at $0.3950 per point and Gemini 3.6 Flash at $0.1327.
Does Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Opus 5 and 1.0M for Gemini 3.6 Flash.
Do Claude Opus 5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 5 and $0.075 for Gemini 3.6 Flash, against full input rates of $5.00 and $0.750. 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 2026-06-25, 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.