Gemini 3.5 vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 3.5 is meaningfully stronger at speed (90 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Gemini 3.5 is 90% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •o1 has a 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) 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
| Gemini 3.5 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) | ✓200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$1.50 | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $9.00 | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemini 3.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (coding) | 76.2% | - |
| MCP Atlas (tool use) | 83.6% | - |
| CharXiv Reasoning (multimodal) | 84.2% | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
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
Choose o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks