Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash score 77.6% vs 77.1% averaged across five Vision Evals tasks (#14 and #15 of 69 models), so they are effectively tied.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash wins 4 of the 5 tasks, but the widest gap is object detection, where Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads 74.3% vs 57.1%.
- Gemini 3.6 Flash is about half the cost: $0.0033 vs $0.0073 overall average cost per sample.
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 is faster: 8.3s vs 10.4s per sample.
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
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Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash on Vision Evals
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash Comparison Table
Evals updated November 12, 2026Pricing updated November 13, 2026
| Property | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | |
| Category | closed | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Sep 2026 | Jul 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Parameters | Unknown | Unknown |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Commercial use | commercial use per vendor terms | commercial use per vendor terms |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $2.00 | $0.750 |
| Output $/1M | $10.00 | $3.75 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Video Classification | Not listed | Supported |
| Model Features | ||
Both support 3 more features | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 77.6% | 77.1% |
| Avg cost / sample | $0.0073 | $0.0033 |
| Avg speed / sample | 8.33s | 10.43s |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 74.3% ±0.9, Mean of 3 runs, range 73.5 to 75.3 | 57.1% ±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 55.9 to 59.4 |
| Object Detection (high) | 76.8% ±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.5 to 77.3 | 70.7% ±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 70.3 to 71.2 |
| Counting (low) | 79.3% ±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 79.7 | 80.2% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4 |
| Counting (high) | 82.9% ±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 81.1 to 83.8 | 79.3% ±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 77.0 to 82.4 |
| Identification (low) | 91.7% ±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.5 to 93.8 | 99.0% ±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 100.0 |
| Identification (high) | 90.6% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 90.6 to 90.6 | 100.0% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 100.0 to 100.0 |
| OCR (low) | 66.3% | 71.8% |
| by category |
|
|
| OCR (high) | – | 77.4% |
| by category |
| |
| Reasoning (low) | 76.4% ±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.5 to 76.8 | 77.7% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.2 to 80.1 |
| Reasoning (high) | 83.9% ±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.1 to 85.4 | 81.0% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.5 to 83.4 |
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash: Overview
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the second release in the Claude 5.5 family, following Claude Opus 5.5. It accepts interleaved text and image input and returns text, operating with a 1M token context window and a maximum output of 128K tokens per request. The model uses adaptive thinking by default, allocating variable reasoning effort per request rather than exposing a manual extended thinking toggle, and its training data cutoff is June 2026. Anthropic positions it as a faster, lower cost complement to Opus 5.5 for well scoped everyday tasks, bug fixing, and producing documents, slides, and spreadsheets.
Anthropic describes it as the first Sonnet model able to complete Pokemon Red from screenshots alone, and it generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 while using fewer tokens for equivalent work.
Gemini 3.6 Flash is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, positioned as the workhorse tier in the Gemini 3.x family. It accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs with a 1 million token context window and produces up to 64,000 output tokens. The model builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash, incorporating developer and customer feedback to improve token efficiency, coding quality, and knowledge work performance. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, it consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and on some benchmarks such as DeepSWE, token reduction reaches up to 65%. It supports function calling, structured output, search as a tool, and code execution, and includes computer use as a built-in capability in the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise.
On coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE versus 37% for 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench versus 49.7%. The model carries a knowledge cutoff of March 2026 and ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards covering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cyber offense domains, with training to minimize refusals for beneficial uses. It is a proprietary, closed-weights model available in preview through the Gemini API via Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app.
Frequently Asked Questions
On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Gemini 3.6 Flash performed better. It scores higher on 4 of the five vision tasks and averages 77.1% (#15 of 69) against 77.6% (#14 of 69) for Claude Sonnet 5.5. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.
Yes. On the Vision Evals Object Detection benchmark at low effort, Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads with 74.3% against 57.1%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.
Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0033 per sample against $0.0073. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is priced at $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $10.00 per 1M output; Gemini 3.6 Flash is priced at $0.75 per 1M input tokens and $3.75 per 1M output. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 8.3s per inference against 10.4s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for image captioning and OCR in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.