Comparing 2 models

Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 3.8 Flash

Benchmarks through

Verdict

Gemini 3.8 Flash places higher on 2 of the 3 tasks where both are ranked. Gemini 3.8 Flash costs 2.4x less per input token. Gemini 3.8 Flash accepts 1.0x more context.

  • Choose Claude Sonnet 5.5 for Computer & Browser Use (#6).
  • Choose Gemini 3.8 Flash for Charts & Diagrams (#1), Vision & Documents (#1).

Built from the published task rankings below; ranks come from each task's own weighted benchmarks, so a win on one task says nothing about another.

metric
Model 1Claude Sonnet 5.5
Model 2Gemini 3.8 Flash
Best for
Code Completion (#1)
Business Writing (#1)
Provider
anthropic
google
Context
1M
1.0MBest
Input / 1M
$2
$0.83Best
Output / 1M
$10
$4.13Best
Tool use
yesBest
yesBest
Vision
yesBest
yesBest
Reasoning
yesBest
yesBest
Open-weight
—
—
Released
Sep 26, 2026
Sep 2, 2026

Measured head to head

Benchmarks both models were run on

EvaluationClaude Sonnet 5.5Gemini 3.8 FlashSource
Design Arena Coding1366 Elo1306 Elosource · 2026-10-16
Design Arena UI1378 Elo1319 Elosource · 2026-10-16
Design Arena Website1330 Elo1303 Elosource · 2026-10-16
FrontierMath Tiers 1-3 (Epoch AI)88.8% ± 1.968.4% ± 2.8source · 2026-09-29
GPQA Diamond (Epoch AI)95.6% ± 1.495.4% ± 1.4source · 2026-09-29
LiveBench Agentic Coding56.3%54.2%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Coding91.4%72.5%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Data Analysis59.5%54.0%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Instruction Following56.8%81.4%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Language78.0%87.8%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Math96.1%91.6%source · 2026-10-16
LiveBench Reasoning91.6%89.3%source · 2026-10-16
LMArena Agent12.54source · 2026-10-14
LMArena Agent Bash Recovery15-0.7source · 2026-10-08
LMArena Agent Steerability12.32.1source · 2026-10-14
LMArena Agent Task Outcome205.1source · 2026-10-14
LMArena Agent Tool Hallucination0.50.5source · 2026-10-14
LMArena Creative Writing1467 Elo1492 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Instruction Following1488 Elo1491 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Long Query1494 Elo1507 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Math1499 Elo1527 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Text1475 Elo1496 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Text Factuality1474 Elo1474 Elosource · 2026-10-15
LMArena Vision1266 Elo1289 Elosource · 2026-10-09
LMArena Vision Diagrams1320 Elo1333 Elosource · 2026-10-09
LMArena Vision OCR1280 Elo1317 Elosource · 2026-10-09
LMArena WebDev1774 Elo1585 Elosource · 2026-10-13
LMArena WebDev Image-to-Web1740 Elo1593 Elosource · 2026-10-09
OTIS Mock AIME (Epoch AI)100% ± 098.9% ± 0.9source · 2026-09-29
SimpleQA Verified (Epoch AI)46.5% ± 1.669.7% ± 1.5source · 2026-09-29
Terminal-Bench (4.0)61.8%19.1%source · 2026-10-16

Values are as published by each evaluator, in its own units; rows from different evaluators are not on a common scale.

task evidence

How they place when the question changes

Lower ranks are better. “Best” marks the strongest option in this shortlist for that task.