Command R+ vs Gemini 3.5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 3.5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (90 vs 5).
- •Gemini 3.5 is 40% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Command R+ has a 128K tokens context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Command R+ | Gemini 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Cohere | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.50 | ✓$1.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | $9.00 |
| Release date | 2024-08 | 2026-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Command R+ | Gemini 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| RAG (BEIR) | Top-5 | - |
| MMLU | ~75% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (coding) | - | 76.2% |
| MCP Atlas (tool use) | - | 83.6% |
| CharXiv Reasoning (multimodal) | - | 84.2% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Command R+ if...
- →Your core use case is grounded RAG with citations
- →You need reliable multi-step tool/agent orchestration
- →You want an enterprise model available on Bedrock
- →You need multilingual responses across the 10 optimized languages
Choose Gemini 3.5 if...
- →You need frontier agent/coding performance without frontier prices
- →Building autonomous agents that make many tool calls
- →High-throughput production workloads that were previously too costly on a Pro model
- →You want a strong default multimodal model with a 1M-token context window