Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite by Google? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 40.80
Total cost: $622

GoogleGemini 3.5 Flash-LiteOff the frontier

Intelligence: 22.20
Total cost: $366

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… scores 18.6 points higher (40.8 vs 22.2) but costs 1.7× as much to run the benchmark ($622 vs $366; premium vs mid-range cost classes). Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)	Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	40.8	22.2	−45.6% Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is 45.6% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$622.28	$365.63	−41.2% Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is 41.2% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	6.20s	9.51s	+53.4% Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is 53.4% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.30 / $2.50
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Speech, Video

Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 45.6% less intelligence, 41.2% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 53.4% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): what beats it Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Gemini 3.5 Flash-LiteToday's Pareto 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-sonnet-5-5-medium/gemini-3-5-flash-lite · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/gemini-3-5-flash-lite?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill