Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 2.5 Flash is 91% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Gemini 2.5 Flash has a 1M context window - 5x larger than Claude Haiku 4.5's 200K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.80 | ✓$0.075 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $4.00 | $0.30 |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2025-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~82% | ~89% |
| HumanEval | ~88% | ~85% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Haiku 4.5
- ✓Lowest latency in the Claude lineup
- ✓Extremely cost-effective at scale
- ✓Strong at classification and extraction
- ✓Good at following structured output schemas
- ✓Handles 200K context at low cost
Gemini 2.5 Flash
- ✓Exceptional price-to-performance ratio
- ✓1M context at near-commodity pricing
- ✓Multimodal support at low cost
- ✓Fast inference latency
- ✓Strong summarization and classification
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you need...
- →High-volume API pipelines
- →Real-time classification
- →Form and document extraction
- →Low-latency chatbots
Choose Gemini 2.5 Flash if you need...
- →High-volume, long-context tasks
- →Cost-sensitive production workloads
- →Document and media summarization
- →Retrieval-augmented pipelines