Claude Sonnet 5 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 5 is meaningfully stronger at coding (92 vs 75 on our capability index).
- •Gemini 2.5 Flash is 90% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 5 has a 1M context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | ✓$0.30 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $2.50 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ~85.2% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 80.4% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 63.2% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 81.2% | - |
| Context window | - | 1M tokens |
| Input price | - | $0.30/1M |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 5 if...
- →You want frontier-adjacent agentic coding but need better cost-efficiency than Opus
- →You are running high-volume agent loops and want strong reasoning per dollar
- →You are already on Sonnet 4.6 and want a same-price capability upgrade
- →You need a 1M context window with fast latency
Choose Gemini 2.5 Flash if...
- →High-volume, latency-sensitive production workloads
- →Chatbots, extraction, classification, and summarization at scale
- →You need decent reasoning but must control costs