Claude Opus 4.6 vs Gemini 3 Flash
Direct comparison between anthropic and google for chat models. Specs, prices, strengths, weaknesses — decide on facts.
At a glance
- · Cheaper: Gemini 3 Flash
- · Longer context window: Gemini 3 Flash at 1,000,000 tokens
- · Claude Opus 4.6: Highest hit rate on SWE-bench among closed-source models
- · Gemini 3 Flash: 1M token context at mini-tier pricing
Spec comparison
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | anthropic | |
| Input per 1M tokens | $5.00 / 1M | $0.50 / 1M |
| Output per 1M tokens | $25.00 / 1M | $3.00 / 1M |
| Context window | 200,000 tok | 1,000,000 tok |
| Max output | 32,000 tok | 65,536 tok |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-07 | 2025-11 |
| Vision | ||
| Audio | ||
| Tool calling | ||
| JSON mode | ||
| Structured output | ||
| Reasoning |
Claude Opus 4.6 — strengths
- +Highest hit rate on SWE-bench among closed-source models
- +Excellent at multi-day agentic tasks without drift
- +Top performance on multi-repo code analysis
Gemini 3 Flash — strengths
- +1M token context at mini-tier pricing
- +Very low latency, ideal for realtime
- +Multimodal: image, audio, and video input
Claude Opus 4.6 — weaknesses
- −Substantially pricier per token than Sonnet — rarely worth the markup
- −Higher latency, especially with extended thinking enabled
Gemini 3 Flash — weaknesses
- −Code quality clearly below Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.4-mini
- −Complex reasoning chains fail sooner than on Pro