Claude Opus 4.6 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 against Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.

Last updated March 2026 · Compare other models
Quick Verdict

Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro are virtually tied on benchmark quality (Elo 1395 vs 1395), but Gemini 3.1 Pro is 53% cheaper on blended cost.

Claude Opus 4.6
Anthropic
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Google
Input Price $5.00/1M $2.00/1M
Output Price $25.00/1M $12.00/1M
Blended Price $15.00/1M $7.00/1M
LMSYS Elo 1395 1395
Context Window 1,000,000 1,000,000
Provider Anthropic Google

Pricing breakdown

When comparing LLM API pricing, Gemini 3.1 Pro charges $2.00 per 1M input tokens compared to Claude Opus 4.6's $5.00 — a 60% difference. For output tokens, Gemini 3.1 Pro costs $12.00/1M versus $25.00/1M for Claude Opus 4.6. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), Gemini 3.1 Pro comes in at $7.00/1M tokens versus $15.00/1M for Claude Opus 4.6.

Quality & benchmarks

In terms of quality, Claude Opus 4.6 (Elo 1395) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (Elo 1395) are essentially neck-and-neck on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard. The 0-point gap is within the margin of uncertainty, meaning both models deliver comparable output quality for most use cases. Your choice between them should come down to pricing, ecosystem preferences, and specific feature needs rather than raw benchmark performance.

Context window comparison

Both Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro offer a 1M-token context window, making them equally suited for processing large codebases, lengthy documents, and multi-turn conversations.

Monthly cost estimate

Adjust the sliders to see how costs compare for your workload.

Claude Opus 4.6
per month
Gemini 3.1 Pro
per month

Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you need...

Deep reasoning and analysis
1M token context for massive documents
Best-in-class coding and agentic tasks

Choose Gemini 3.1 Pro if you need...

Tied for highest Elo rating
1M token context window
Strong multimodal capabilities

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