Claude Opus 4.8 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Full profiles: Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic) and Gemini 3.6 Flash (Google): every benchmark, price and rank.
Updated · Data from 12 sources
As of 26 Oct 2026, Claude Opus 4.8 (max) and Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) are neck and neck on quality (63.3 vs 62.0 on the BenchLeader Index, inside the ±5.6 margin of error), and Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) costs 6.7× less, which makes it the better buy for most workloads. Gemini 3.6 Flash (high)'s current price runs until 31 Dec 2026; from 1 Jan 2027 Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) costs 3.3× less ($3.00 vs $10.00 per 1M blended); on use case, pick Claude Opus 4.8 for maths (68 vs 60), Gemini 3.6 Flash for agents & tools (59 vs 57).
Claude Opus 4.8 benchmarks max Anthropic
Gemini 3.6 Flash benchmarks high GoogleOpen in the comparison toolWhich to pick for…
The pick's numbers come first. Category scores on the BenchLeader scale (50 is the average model, 15 points one standard deviation). High confidence means a lead of half a standard deviation or more; under one point is called either.
| Use case | Pick | Why | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | Claude Opus 4.8 | 59 vs 57 category score; SciCode 53.5% vs 53.4% | Medium |
| Agents & tool use | Gemini 3.6 Flash | 59 vs 57 category score; τ³-Banking (AA) 29.9% vs 34.2% | Medium |
| Maths | Claude Opus 4.8 | 68 vs 60 category score; FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 80.0% vs 59.0% | High |
| Reasoning | Claude Opus 4.8 | 69 vs 63 category score; CritPt 20.9% vs 10.6% | Medium |
| Knowledge | Claude Opus 4.8 | 67 vs 66 category score; AA-Omniscience 28.8 vs 22.1 | Medium |
| Long documents | Gemini 3.6 Flash | 65 vs 64 category score; AA-LCR 80.0% vs 77.7% | Medium |
| Chat quality (human preference) | – | Only Gemini 3.6 Flash has an Arena rating (68 category score) | Not comparable |
| Lowest cost | Gemini 3.6 Flash | $1.50 vs $10.00 per 1M blended; agentic coding session $0.060 vs $0.400; from 1 Jan 2027: $3.00 vs $10.00 | – |
| Fastest first answer | Gemini 3.6 Flash | 17.7 s (Gemini 3.6 Flash (high)) vs 35.4 s (Claude Opus 4.8 (max)) to the first answer token | – |
| High volume on a budget | Neither flagship | A smaller model is usually the better fit: Cheapest good LLMs, Fastest LLMs | – |
Key differences
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max) and Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) are neck and neck on quality (63.3 vs 62.0, within the ±5.6 margin).
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max) is stronger in coding, composite, instruction following, knowledge, maths, reasoning.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) is stronger in agents & tools, long context, human preference, multimodal.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) is 6.7× cheaper ($1.50 vs $10.00 per 1M blended) until 31 Dec 2026, then $3.00 vs $10.00 from 1 Jan 2027.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) streams 3.3× faster (197 vs 60 tokens per second).
At a glance
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.8 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | |
| Released | 28 May 2026 | 21 Jul 2026 |
| Context window (tokens) | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Compared at | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) |
| Open weights | No | No |
| Price in / out / cached input per 1M | $5.00 / $25.00 / $0.500 | $0.750 / $3.75 / $0.075 |
| Announced price change | None announced | $1.50 / $7.50 / $0.150 from 1 Jan 2027 |
Limits, availability and announced prices from the vendors' own pages: ai.google.dev pricing (checked 20 Oct 2026). Everything else is from the day's data.
Category by category
Category scores on the BenchLeader scale: 50 is the average evaluated model, 15 points is one standard deviation. A gap under one point is called level.
| Category | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning | 68.8 | 62.6 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| Coding | 58.9 | 57.1 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| Agents & tools | 56.5 | 59.2 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
| Maths | 68.1 | 59.5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| Knowledge | 66.9 | 65.6 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| Instruction following | 62.1 | – | not comparable |
| Human preference | – | 67.5 | not comparable |
| Multimodal | – | 65.4 | not comparable |
| Long context | 63.8 | 65.0 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
| Composite | 76.2 | 67.5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
Where sources disagree
Across the 35 benchmarks both have, Claude Opus 4.8 leads 26, Gemini 3.6 Flash leads 9. Independent sources split: Claude Opus 4.8 leads on AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2; Gemini 3.6 Flash leads on Arena Text.
| Overall index | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 63.3 | 62.0 | neck and neck |
| AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2 | 41.8 | 34.0 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| Arena Text | 1482† | 1483 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
Each publisher runs its own tasks, harnesses and effort settings, so their overall verdicts can differ; BenchLeader reconciles them on one scale. † measured at another effort setting of the same model (the publisher did not test the one compared here).
Price, speed and latency
List prices blended at three input tokens per output token. Per-task prices use the token counts on the methodology page; suite cost is what Artificial Analysis paid to run its whole Intelligence Index.
| Measure | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) |
|---|---|---|
| Blended price per 1M tokens, until 31 Dec 2026 | $10.00 | $1.50 |
| Input / output per 1M | $5.00 / $25.00 | $0.750 / $3.75 |
| Blended price per 1M from 1 Jan 2027 | $10.00 | $3.00 |
| Input / output per 1M from 1 Jan 2027 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $1.50 / $7.50 |
| Cached input per 1M | $0.500 | $0.075 |
| Price per task: chat reply | $0.0095 | $0.0014 |
| Price per task: summarize a 30-page report | $0.075 | $0.011 |
| Price per task: code edit | $0.068 | $0.010 |
| Price per task: agentic coding session | $0.400 | $0.060 |
| Price per task: structured extraction | $0.015 | $0.0023 |
| Cost to run a full benchmark suite | $4.08 | $1.60 |
| Output speed | 60 tok/s | 197 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 35.4 s | 17.7 s |
| Time to a complete answer | 43.8 s | 20.2 s |
Per token is not per task: on Artificial Analysis' full suite Claude Opus 4.8 (max) cost $4.08 and Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) $1.60, because Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) used about 2.6× as many tokens for the same work, which a per-token price hides.
Each model is compared at its best-ranked reasoning-effort setting. Claude Opus 4.8 (max) scores 63.3 and takes 35 s to its first answer token; Claude Opus 4.8 (high) scores 60.7 in 1 s, Claude Opus 4.8 scores 60.1 in 1 s. Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) scores 62.0 and takes 18 s to its first answer token; Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49.5 in 1 s. Higher effort means more thinking before the answer: better scores, longer waits and more tokens billed. How reasoning effort changes scores and cost.
Every benchmark
124 benchmarks, grouped by category; each name links to the board and its leaders. † measured at another effort setting of the same model, shown for reference and not counted as a win.
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | BenchLeader | 63.3 | 62.0 |
| Agents & tools score | BenchLeader | 56.5 | 59.2 |
| Coding score | BenchLeader | 58.9 | 57.1 |
| Composite score | BenchLeader | 76.2 | 67.5 |
| Instruction following score | BenchLeader | 62.1 | – |
| Knowledge score | BenchLeader | 66.9 | 65.6 |
| Long context score | BenchLeader | 63.8 | 65.0 |
| Maths score | BenchLeader | 68.1 | 59.5 |
| Reasoning score | BenchLeader | 68.8 | 62.6 |
| Human preference score | BenchLeader | – | 67.5 |
| Multimodal score | BenchLeader | – | 65.4 |
| Blended price $/M | BenchLeader | $10.00 | $1.50 |
| Output speed | BenchLeader | 60 tok/s | 197 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | BenchLeader | 35.4 s | 17.7 s |
| Context window | BenchLeader | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Reasoning | |||
| GPQA Diamond | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 91.0% | 94.1% |
| SimpleBench | SimpleBench | 64.8%† | – |
| Arena Hard Prompts | Arena (LMArena) | 1505† | 1501 |
| LiveBench 1.0 Reasoning | LiveBench | 89.2% | 85.2% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 92.0% | 92.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 48.7% | 40.8% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | Vals AI | 92.4%† | 93.4% |
| EnigmaEval | Scale AI SEAL | 23.5%† | – |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8%† | – |
| ARC-AGI-1 | ARC Prize | 92.5% | 91.2% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | ARC Prize | 72.1%† | 60.4% |
| ARC-AGI-3 | ARC Prize | 1.5%† | – |
| CritPt | Artificial Analysis | 20.9% | 10.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 52.0% | 40.0% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 36.0% | 30.0% |
| LMCA | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 57.5% | 44.9% |
| DTBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 94.9% | 95.5% |
| ForecastBench | ForecastBench | 66.3% | 65.9%† |
| BTF-3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 14.0%† | – |
| Coding | |||
| SciCode | SciCode | 53.5% | 53.4% |
| WeirdML | WeirdML | 70.5%† | 56.1% |
| FrontierCode | Cognition | 46.5%† | 34.4%† |
| GSO-Bench | GSO-Bench | 47.1%† | – |
| Arena Coding | Arena (LMArena) | 1529† | 1518 |
| Arena WebDev | Arena (LMArena) | 1536† | 1538 |
Show all 124 benchmarks
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Opus 4.8 (max) | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | |||
| LiveBench 1.0 Coding | LiveBench | 81.8% | 77.9% |
| SciCode (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 54.4% | 53.4% |
| LiveCodeBench | Vals AI | 87.8%† | 88.1% |
| IOI | Vals AI | – | 35.1% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | Vals AI | 88.6%† | 79.6% |
| Code Migration | Vals AI | 47.3%† | 30.9% |
| ProgramBench | Vals AI | 1.0%† | 0.0% |
| Vibe Code Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 82.7%† | 64.0% |
| SWE Atlas: Codebase QnA | Scale AI SEAL | 57.3%† | – |
| SWE Atlas: Refactoring | Scale AI SEAL | 46.7%† | – |
| SWE Atlas: Test Writing | Scale AI SEAL | 49.6%† | – |
| Surface Evolver Bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 87.5%† | – |
| DeepSWE v1.1 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 59.0% | 46.7% |
| ALE-Bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 1563.8† | 715.5 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 21.7% | 7.1% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 84.6% | 77.5% |
| Agents & tools | |||
| Terminal-Bench | Terminal-Bench | 23.6% | – |
| OSWorld-Verified 2.0 | OSWorld | 20.6% | – |
| Remote Labor Index | Scale AI / CAIS | 8.3%† | – |
| APEX-Agents | Mercor | 48.9% | 46.9%† |
| LiveBench Agentic Coding | LiveBench | 50.5% | 43.4% |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | Artificial Analysis | 58.3% | – |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 94.4% | – |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | Vals AI | 71.9%† | 73.8% |
| MCP Atlas | Scale AI SEAL | 82.2% | – |
| HiL-Bench | Scale AI SEAL | 35.3%† | – |
| τ³-bench Banking | τ²-bench | 39.7% | – |
| τ³-Banking (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 34.2% | 29.9% |
| Analyst Agent (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 45.0% | – |
| CyberBench | Vals AI | – | 45.4% |
| Finance Agent v2 | Vals AI | 53.9%† | 56.3% |
| Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1 | Vals AI | 9.6%† | 3.3% |
| Legal Research Bench | Vals AI | 43.8%† | 25.0% |
| SkillsBench | Vals AI | 59.2%† | – |
| Tax Agent Bench | Vals AI | 30.0%† | 18.0% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | 70.0%† | – |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | 23.2%† | – |
| Terminal-Bench Science | Vals AI | 4.3%† | 4.3% |
| Time Horizon Index: KSP | Vals AI | 11.8%† | – |
| Arena Search | Arena (LMArena) | 1195† | – |
| DeepResearch Bench | DeepResearch Bench | 50.2%† | – |
| PostTrainBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 32.9% | – |
| GBAEval | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 70.9%† | – |
| Vending-Bench 2 | Andon Labs | 2992.3 | – |
| AutomationBench | Artificial Analysis | 45.6% | 53.0% |
| GDP.pdf (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 22.8% | 17.4% |
| EnterpriseOps-Gym | Artificial Analysis | 44.0% | – |
| AA-Briefcase v1.1 | Artificial Analysis | 1319 | – |
| FACTS Search | 79.6%† | 68.2%† | |
| Maths | |||
| FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 80.0% | 59.0% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 56.1% | 21.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 98.3% | 94.2% |
| ProofBench | Vals AI | 69.0% | 36.0%† |
| LiveBench Mathematics | LiveBench | 94.3% | 86.4% |
| AIME 2026 | MathArena | 100.0% | 96.7%† |
| HMMT February 2026 | MathArena | 95.5% | 89.4%† |
| MathArena Apex | MathArena | 81.3% | 26.0%† |
| Arena Maths | Arena (LMArena) | 1477† | 1504 |
| Knowledge | |||
| SimpleQA Verified | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 53.0% | 66.2% |
| LiveBench 1.0 Data Analysis | LiveBench | 66.0% | 63.0% |
| AA-Omniscience | Artificial Analysis | 28.8 | 22.1 |
| MMLU-Pro | Vals AI | 89.6%† | 89.3% |
| LegalBench | Vals AI | 83.6%† | 86.7% |
| CorpFin | Vals AI | 66.7%† | 63.3% |
| TaxEval | Vals AI | 75.6%† | 74.9% |
| BioMysteryBench | Vals AI | – | 58.5% |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark | Vals AI | 69.4%† | 65.4% |
| MedCode | Vals AI | 53.2%† | 53.1% |
| MedScribe | Vals AI | 85.8%† | 79.7% |
| Public Benefits Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 68.1%† | 56.6% |
| DrugDiscoveryBench | Scale AI SEAL | 46.8% | – |
| EBR-bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 28.6% | – |
| GDP.pdf | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 24.0% | 14.0% |
| AA-Omniscience: accuracy | Artificial Analysis | 48.8% | 50.0% |
| AA-Omniscience: non-hallucination | Artificial Analysis | 60.8% | 44.4% |
| Instruction following | |||
| LiveBench Language | LiveBench | 79.7% | 83.9% |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | LiveBench | 72.0% | 75.4% |
| IFBench | Artificial Analysis | 62.2% | – |
| Arena Instruction Following | Arena (LMArena) | 1478† | 1473 |
| Human preference | |||
| Arena Text | Arena (LMArena) | 1474† | 1483 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | EQ-Bench | 1267† | – |
| Arena Creative Writing | Arena (LMArena) | 1463† | 1471 |
| Arena Multi-turn | Arena (LMArena) | 1495† | 1488 |
| Arena Longer Queries | Arena (LMArena) | 1499† | 1485 |
| Multimodal | |||
| Arena Vision | Arena (LMArena) | 1289† | 1299 |
| MMMU-Pro | Artificial Analysis | – | 83.2% |
| MMMU-Pro (Vals) | Vals AI | 86.6%† | 88.4% |
| MortgageTax | Vals AI | 69.9%† | 67.6% |
| SAGE | Vals AI | 54.8%† | 48.7% |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 14.5%† | 31.2%† |
| Long context | |||
| AA-LCR | Artificial Analysis | 77.7% | 80.0% |
| Arena Document | Arena (LMArena) | 1475† | 1453 |
| MLCR | Artificial Analysis | 19.4% | 10.0% |
| Composite | |||
| Epoch Capabilities Index | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 159.0† | 154.5† |
| LiveBench 1.0 | LiveBench | 76.2% | 73.6% |
| AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2 | Artificial Analysis | 41.8 | 34.0 |
| Vals RSI Index | Vals AI | 24.0% | – |
| Vals Multimodal Index | Vals AI | 70.9%† | 65.1% |
| Safety & honesty | |||
| FORTRESS | Scale AI SEAL | 18.2% | – |
Data as of 2026-10-26. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
What changed
- Gemini 3.6 Flash: list price moves to $1.50 / $7.50 per 1M input / output tokens (announced).
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): 1 new result (AA-Briefcase v1.1).
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): 1 new result (Vals RSI Index).
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high): 1 new result (Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1).
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): 1 score revision.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high): 1 score revision.
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): 1 new result (ForecastBench).
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): BenchLeader Index 62.5 → 63.4.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high): BenchLeader Index 61.2 → 62.1.
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max): 5 new results (AutomationBench, GDP.pdf (AA), MLCR…).
Related comparisons
- Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Claude Opus 4.8 vs Gemini 4 Argon
- Claude Opus 4.8 vs Muse Wonder Full
- Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemini 4 Argon
- Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Muse Wonder Full
- Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Claude Fable 5.1
- Claude Opus 4.7 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Rankings: Best LLM overall · Best LLM for agents · Best cheap LLMs
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash: questions
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Gemini 3.6 Flash?
- Claude Opus 4.8 (max) and Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) are neck and neck on quality (63.3 vs 62.0, within the ±5.6 margin). The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; the two are within the margin of error as of 2026-10-26, so check the category scores for your use.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Gemini 3.6 Flash, and will that change?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper today: $1.50 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token. Yes, that changes: Gemini 3.6 Flash's list price changes on 1 Jan 2027, and from then Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper ($3.00 vs $10.00 blended).
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Gemini 3.6 Flash for coding?
- Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in coding (59 vs 57 on the category index, where 50 is average). On SciCode, the top shared coding benchmark, it is 53.5% for Claude Opus 4.8 against 53.4% for Gemini 3.6 Flash.
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Gemini 3.6 Flash for agents and tool use?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash scores higher in agentic tasks (59 vs 57 on the category index, where 50 is average). On τ³-Banking (AA), the top shared agents & tools benchmark, it is 34.2% for Claude Opus 4.8 against 29.9% for Gemini 3.6 Flash.
- Which is better for long documents?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash scores higher on long-context benchmarks (65 vs 64). Both take about 1M tokens: Claude Opus 4.8 1,000,000, Gemini 3.6 Flash 1,048,576.
- Which has lower latency?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) answers first: 17.7 s against 35.4 s to the first answer token, as Artificial Analysis measures it. Reasoning effort drives most of this: a higher setting thinks longer before it answers.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 4.8 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash streams faster: 197 against 60 output tokens per second.
- Do independent benchmarks agree on Claude Opus 4.8 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash?
- Across the 35 benchmarks both have, Claude Opus 4.8 leads 26, Gemini 3.6 Flash leads 9. Independent sources split: Claude Opus 4.8 leads on AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2; Gemini 3.6 Flash leads on Arena Text.
- When was Gemini 3.6 Flash released?
- Gemini 3.6 Flash was released on 21 Jul 2026.