Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Pricing & Specs

Anthropic vs Google (Gemini), side by side from a live registry. Specs below, then benchmark both on your own task.

$25
Claude Opus 5 output / 1M
$1.5
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite output / 1M
1M / 1.04858M
context windows

TL;DR: On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is about 17.5x cheaper than Claude Opus 5. But per-token price is not cost per result: a cheaper model that needs more tokens, retries, or hand-holding can end up more expensive on your workload. The specs below are facts; which one is better at YOUR task is measurable, not guessable.

API Pricing: Claude Opus 5 vs Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite

TokensClaude Opus 5Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Input$5 / 1M$0.25 / 1M
Output$25 / 1M$1.5 / 1M
Cached input$0.5 / 1M$0.01 / 1M

What that means in practice (1K input + 500 output tokens)

1x One typical task: $0.0175 on Claude Opus 5 vs $0.0010 on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
1K 1,000 runs: $17.50 vs $1.00
💡 Real cost depends on how verbose each model is on YOUR prompts. Benchmark to measure actual tokens, not estimates.

Specs Compared

SpecClaude Opus 5Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Context window1M tokens1.04858M tokens
Max output tokens128K tokens65.536K tokens
Input modalitiestext, imagetext, image, audio, video, PDF
Knowledge cutoff-January 2025
Latency (measured)--
Reasoning modelYesNo
Tool / function callingYesYes
JSON modeYesYes
Prompt cachingYesYes

When to Choose Which

High volume on a budget: start with Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite; only pay for Claude Opus 5 if the benchmark shows a quality gap that matters.
Multi-step reasoning tasks: Claude Opus 5 is a reasoning model; expect better step-by-step work at the cost of more output tokens.
Everything else: the honest answer is to benchmark both on your actual task. Quality differences are task-specific and shift with every release.

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite?

Claude Opus 5 costs $5/$25 per 1M input/output tokens; Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite costs $0.25/$1.5. On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is about 17.5x cheaper than Claude Opus 5.

Which has the bigger context window, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite?

Claude Opus 5 has a 1M-token context window; Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite has 1.04858M tokens.

Is Claude Opus 5 better than Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite?

It depends on the task. Generic leaderboards won't tell you which one wins on YOUR workload. OpenMark lets you benchmark Claude Opus 5 and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite head to head on your own task with real API calls, no API keys needed, free tier available.

Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite for YOUR Task?

Spec tables can't answer that. Run both head to head on your actual workload:
real API calls, ranked results with accuracy, cost, and latency. Free tier available.

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