Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Gemini 3.5
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 3.5 has a 1M context window - 5x larger than Claude Sonnet 4.6's 200K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Gemini 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | TBA |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | TBA |
| Release date | 2025-07 | 2026-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Gemini 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ~49% | - |
| MMLU | ~88% | - |
| HumanEval | ~93% | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- ✓Strong coding and debugging across most languages
- ✓Excellent at following multi-step instructions
- ✓200K context handles entire codebases
- ✓Fast enough for interactive use cases
- ✓Solid function calling and structured output
Gemini 3.5
- ✓Action-first architecture for agentic and multi-step workflows
- ✓1M token context window - largest in class
- ✓Powers Google Antigravity CLI for terminal-native coding
- ✓Native Workspace integration with autonomous task execution
- ✓Companion Gemini Omni handles anything-to-anything multimodal generation
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need...
- →Production API integrations
- →Coding assistants and IDEs
- →Document analysis
- →Agentic workflows
Choose Gemini 3.5 if you need...
- →Agentic workflows requiring multi-step tool use
- →Large codebase comprehension and editing
- →Google Workspace automation
- →Long document and multimodal analysis