Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Gemini 3 Flash
Gemini 3.5 Flash Verdict
- Gemini 3.5 Flash (medium) leads on quality: 64.1 vs 61.6.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash (medium) is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, multimodal, reasoning.
- Gemini 3 Flash (thinking) is stronger in instruction following, long context.
- Gemini 3 Flash (thinking) is 3.0× cheaper ($1.13 vs $3.38 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Gemini 3.5 Flash (medium) | Gemini 3 Flash (thinking) |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 64.1 | 61.6 |
| Agents & tools score | 68.0 | 67.4 |
| Coding score | 58.9 | – |
| Composite score | 71.5 | 62.3 |
| Human preference score | 67.8 | – |
| Instruction following score | 72.5 | 75.4 |
| Knowledge score | 74.0 | 69.0 |
| Long context score | 63.6 | 65.5 |
| Multimodal score | 67.6 | 64.4 |
| Reasoning score | 67.1 | – |
| Blended price $/M | $3.38 | $1.13 |
| Output speed | 217 tok/s | 180 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 15.5 s | 6.1 s |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| LMArena Text | 1476 | – |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1493 | – |
| LMArena Coding | 1503 | – |
| LMArena WebDev | 1491 | – |
| LMArena Vision | 1306 | – |
| AA Intelligence Index | 33.6 | 26.3 |
| IFBench | 74.6% | 78.0% |
| AA-LCR | 74.3% | 78.0% |
| MMMU-Pro | 83.9% | 79.9% |
| AA-Omniscience | 20.8 | 10.1 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 39.4% | 38.6% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 92.1% | 89.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 41.3% | 36.6% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 95.6% | 80.4% |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Gemini 3 Flash: questions
- Is Gemini 3.5 Flash better than Gemini 3 Flash?
- Gemini 3.5 Flash (medium) leads on quality: 64.1 vs 61.6. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Gemini 3.5 Flash (medium) is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Gemini 3.5 Flash better than Gemini 3 Flash for agentic tasks?
- Gemini 3.5 Flash scores higher in agentic tasks (68 vs 67 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Gemini 3.5 Flash or Gemini 3 Flash?
- Gemini 3 Flash is cheaper: $1.13 against $3.38 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Gemini 3.5 Flash or Gemini 3 Flash?
- Gemini 3.5 Flash streams faster: 217 against 180 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Both accept 1M tokens of context.