Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) 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 3.8 Flash (High)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 40.90
Total cost: $1623

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) scores 0.1 points higher (40.9 vs 40.8) but costs 2.6× as much to run the benchmark ($1623 vs $622; both premium class). Pick Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall….

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)	Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	40.8	40.9	+0.2% Gemini 3.8 Flash (Hig… is 0.2% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$622.28	$1,622.73	+160.8% Gemini 3.8 Flash (Hig… is 2.6× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	6.20s	31.03s	+400.5% Gemini 3.8 Flash (Hig… is 400.5% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.75 / $3.75
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Speech, Video

Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 0.2% more intelligence, 160.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 400.5% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): what beats it Gemini 3.8 Flash (High): 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 3.8 Flash (High) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/gemini-3-8-flash · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/gemini-3-8-flash?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill