// head_to_head
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview vs Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools
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.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools are priced within ~10% of each other.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
- Blended / 1M
- $4.50
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Feb 19, 2026
- Overall score
- 77.0
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools
- Blended / 1M
- $4.50
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Feb 25, 2026
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 77.0 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.1567 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.50 | $4.50 |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Output price / 1M | $12.00 | $12.00 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | $0.200 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 66K | 66K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on top, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools 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 | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,310/mo | $1,310/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,600/mo | $1,600/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,552/mo | $1,552/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,810/mo | $2,810/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,300/mo | $5,300/mo |
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview vs Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview or Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools?
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools are priced within ~10% of each other. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Is Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview cheaper than Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools?
They cost about the same. Both land near $4.50 per million tokens on a 3:1 input:output blend, so price is unlikely to be the deciding factor between them.
Does Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview or Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and 1.0M for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools.
Do Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.200 per million for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and $0.200 for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools, against full input rates of $2.00 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 2026-06-25, 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.