Name: Claude vs Gemini benchmark (2026)
Creator: CompareLLM
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Question 1

Which is better overall, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Pro?

Accepted Answer

Claude Opus 5 has the higher preference Elo in our latest snapshot (1,624). “Better” still depends on coding, price, and latency — see the table.

Question 2

Which is better at coding, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Pro?

Accepted Answer

Claude Opus 5 leads SWE-bench at 79.2% vs 74.6%. SWE-bench is one harness, not your repo.

Question 3

Which is cheaper to run in production?

Accepted Answer

Gemini 3.6 Pro output tokens are $5/1M versus $50/1M. Input prices and retry rates still move the real bill.

Question 4

Which is faster, Claude Opus 5 or Gemini 3.6 Pro?

Accepted Answer

Gemini 3.6 Pro has the lower time-to-first-token (205 ms vs 310 ms). Tokens/sec is a separate column if you care about long completions.

Question 5

Which has the larger context window?

Accepted Answer

Gemini 3.6 Pro accepts 2M tokens versus 1M.

Question 6

Can I self-host either model?

Accepted Answer

Neither model is marked open-weights here. You are comparing hosted APIs.

Question 7

Are these scores from CompareLLM’s own evals?

Accepted Answer

No. V1 aggregates public leaderboards (and optional first-party latency pings). Each cell names its source and date. Read /methodology.

Question 8

What does preference Elo mean on this page?

Accepted Answer

Preference Elo is a crowd vote from LMArena / Arena. People see two hidden answers and pick the one they like more. The model that wins more often gets a higher Elo. That means people preferred it — not that it passed a school test. It is not SWE-bench, not accuracy, and not a number we invent. Claude Opus 5 and Gemini 3.6 Pro Elo cells are dated snapshots from the named source — we do not compute Arena ourselves.

Workload	Pick	Why
Repo / coding agents	Claude Opus 5	Higher SWE-bench (79.2%).
High-volume chat	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Lower output list price ($5/1M).
Voice / low-latency UI	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Lower TTFT (205 ms).
Long-document RAG	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Larger window (2M).
Screenshots / vision	Claude Opus 5	Both accept images. Defaulting to the higher-Elo side (Claude Opus 5).

Workload	Pick	Why
Repo / coding agents	Claude Opus 5	Higher SWE-bench (79.2%).
High-volume chat	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Lower output list price ($5/1M).
Voice / low-latency UI	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Lower TTFT (205 ms).
Long-document RAG	Gemini 3.6 Pro	Larger window (2M).
Screenshots / vision	Claude Opus 5	Both accept images. Defaulting to the higher-Elo side (Claude Opus 5).

Claude vs Gemini benchmark (2026)

Claude Opus 5

Gemini 3.6 Pro

Which brand for which job

Frequently asked questions

Claude vs Gemini benchmark (2026)

Claude Opus 5

Gemini 3.6 Pro

Which brand for which job

Frequently asked questions