Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) vs Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) by Google? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)On the frontier

Intelligence: 57.60
Total cost: $8708

GoogleGemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)On the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $14.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) scores 48.7 points higher (57.6 vs 8.9) but costs 593× as much to run the benchmark ($8708 vs $14.7; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)	Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	57.6	8.9	−84.5% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 84.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$8,708.20	$14.68	−99.8% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 99.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	626.13s	57.75s	−90.8% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 90.8% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$0.02 / $0.10
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Speech, Video

Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): 84.5% less intelligence, 99.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 90.8% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): what beats it Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5/gemma-4-e4b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5/gemma-4-e4b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill