// head_to_head
Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Muse Spark 1.2
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.
Muse Spark 1.2 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
Muse Spark 1.2 leads by 3.3 points overall while listing 1.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Muse Spark 1.2 has the lower sticker price, but Gemini 3.5 Flash earns each point of capability for less — $0.1357 against $0.2199 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
Gemini 3.5 Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $3.38
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- May 19, 2026
- Overall score
- 74.6
meta
Muse Spark 1.2
- Blended / 1M
- $2.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Aug 5, 2026
- Overall score
- 78.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 3.5 Flash | Muse Spark 1.2 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 74.6 | 78.0win |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.1357win | $0.2199 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $3.38 | $2.00win |
| Input price / 1M | $1.50 | $1.25win |
| Output price / 1M | $9.00 | $4.25win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.150 | $0.150 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 66K | — |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 3.5 Flash on top, Muse Spark 1.2 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 3.5 Flash | Muse Spark 1.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $982.80/mo | $560.80/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1200.00/mo | $815.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1164.00/mo | $724.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2107.50/mo | $1513.75/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $3975.00/mo | $3000.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Gemini 3.5 Flash
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.1357 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Muse Spark 1.2
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 78.0.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Muse Spark 1.2
Leads on agentic coding — 57.6 against 49.0.
Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Muse Spark 1.2 FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 3.5 Flash or Muse Spark 1.2?
Muse Spark 1.2 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Muse Spark 1.2 leads by 3.3 points overall while listing 1.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Muse Spark 1.2 has the lower sticker price, but Gemini 3.5 Flash earns each point of capability for less — $0.1357 against $0.2199 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
Is Gemini 3.5 Flash cheaper than Muse Spark 1.2?
Muse Spark 1.2 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Gemini 3.5 Flash lists at $3.38 per million tokens and Muse Spark 1.2 at $2.00 — Muse Spark 1.2 is 1.7× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Gemini 3.5 Flash charges $1.50 in and $9.00 out, Muse Spark 1.2 charges $1.25 and $4.25 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Muse Spark 1.2: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Gemini 3.5 Flash scores 74.6 and Muse Spark 1.2 scores 78.0 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 3.3-point lead for Muse Spark 1.2. 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, Gemini 3.5 Flash or Muse Spark 1.2?
Gemini 3.5 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. Gemini 3.5 Flash works out at $0.1357 per point and Muse Spark 1.2 at $0.2199.
Does Gemini 3.5 Flash or Muse Spark 1.2 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for Gemini 3.5 Flash and 1.0M for Muse Spark 1.2.
Do Gemini 3.5 Flash and Muse Spark 1.2 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.150 per million for Gemini 3.5 Flash and $0.150 for Muse Spark 1.2, against full input rates of $1.50 and $1.25. 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.