AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5VSGoogleGemini 3.6 Flash

Analysis by:the whichllmmodel Editorial Team|Updated: June 2026

Our Take

If your budget allows, Claude Sonnet 5 is the superior choice here, offering a clear benchmark advantage while carrying only a slight price premium (1.3x). We recommend choosing Gemini 3.6 Flash only if you need to optimize costs for very high-volume pipelines.

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Model Specs

Claude Sonnet 5

Website

Benchmarks & Scores

Coding (swe-bench-pro)Winner (+4.5%)

63.2%

excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases

Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)

91.1%

graduate-level science QA

Cost & Context

Cost (per 1M tokens)

$4.00Input: $2.00 | Output: $10.00

Context Window

1.05M tokens

Model Specs

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Website

Benchmarks & Scores

Coding (swe-bench-pro)

58.7%

excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases

Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)Winner (+1.9%)

93%

graduate-level science QA

Cost & Context

Cost (per 1M tokens)1.3x cheaper

$3.00Input: $1.50 | Output: $7.50

Context Window

1.05M tokens

Read our data collection methodology

Frequently Asked Questions about Claude Sonnet 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5. Gemini 3.6 Flash has a blended cost of $3.00/1M tokens, which is about 1.3x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 at $4.00/1M tokens.

Claude Sonnet 5 is better for coding tasks on this benchmark. It scores 63.2% on swe-bench-pro (excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases) compared to Gemini 3.6 Flash which scores 58.7%.

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