Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and Google's Gemini 3.8 Pro.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | Gemini 3.8 Pro | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | — | |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $4.00 | Claude Sonnet 5 (50% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.40 | Claude Sonnet 5 lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $18.00 | Claude Sonnet 5 lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 1.05M | Gemini 3.8 Pro (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 64k | Gemini 3.8 Pro |
| 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 3.8 Pro when looking for Google's tooling integration, specific context window depth (1.05M tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $18/M rate.