Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | — | |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.10 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (95% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.01 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $0.40 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 1.05M | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 8.2k | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| Tokenizer Family | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | Google Gemini SentencePiece (256k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Claude Sonnet 5 when your engineering requirements prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Claude Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $2/M input rate.
Opt for Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite when looking for Google's tooling integration, specific context window depth (1.05M tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $0.4/M rate.