Claude Opus 4.8 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 2.5 Pro is 92% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Gemini 2.5 Pro has a 1M context window - 5x larger than Claude Opus 4.8's 200K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Gemini 2.5 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | ✓$1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $75.00 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Gemini 2.5 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | - | 86.4% |
| MMLU | - | 90.9% |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 63.2% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Opus 4.8
- ✓Best-in-class multi-step reasoning
- ✓Improved instruction following over Opus 4.7
- ✓Reduced refusals on edge-case and nuanced requests
- ✓Superior long-context comprehension at 200K tokens
- ✓Strong scientific and mathematical analysis
Gemini 2.5 Pro
- ✓Largest commercial context window (1M tokens)
- ✓Top benchmark scores on science and math
- ✓Strong multimodal: video, audio, images
- ✓Competitive pricing for the capability tier
- ✓Native Google Search and code execution tools
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if you need...
- →Complex research and analysis tasks
- →High-stakes code generation
- →Long-document analysis
- →Nuanced reasoning requiring careful judgment
Choose Gemini 2.5 Pro if you need...
- →Very long document analysis
- →Video and multimodal understanding
- →Scientific research tasks
- →Large codebase comprehension