# Claude Opus 4.6 vs Gemini 3 Flash Preview

> Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.3 to 52.3 on the Noometry Index. Gemini 3 Flash Preview costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-opus-4-6-vs-gemini-3-flash-preview
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 51

## Summary

- They share 51 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in 9 categories and Gemini 3 Flash Preview in 1 category; 10 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in agentic & tool use, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 51.0 to 38.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is ARC-AGI-2: 69.2% for Claude Opus 4.6 and 33.6% for Gemini 3 Flash Preview.
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview is cheaper at $0.50 / $3 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 1M.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google |
| Noometry Index | 58.3 | 52.3 |
| Rank | 18 | 33 |
| Context | 1M | 1.05M |
| Input $/M | $5 | $0.50 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $3 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.7 (#15)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 51.5 (#35)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 78.7% | 75.4% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 75.6% | 75.8% |
| LMArena WebDev | 1546 | 1439 |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 72% | 72.7% |
| GSO | 41.2% | 9.8% |
| WeirdML | 78% | 61.6% |
| LMArena Coding | 1535 | 1460 |
| ALE-Bench | 996.5 | 1,367 |
| FrontierCode | 26.6% | — |
| AlgoTune | 1.47 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 4.6: 51.0 (#4)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 38.6 (#27)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 79.8% | 64.3% |
| τ²-bench Banking | 27.3% | 27.3% |
| DeepResearch Bench | 55.3% | 49.8% |
| LMArena Search | 1253 | 1198 |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 8,018 | 3,635 |
| APEX-Agents | 46.3% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 4.2% | — |
| τ²-bench Airline | — | 82.5% |
| τ²-bench Retail | — | 76.8% |
| τ²-bench Telecom | — | 91.2% |
| Cybench | 93% | — |
| BALROG | — | 48.1% |
| GBAEval | 44.1% | — |
| GDP.pdf | — | 10% |
| METR Time Horizons | 78.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.7 (#21)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 49.2 (#35)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 69.2% | 33.6% |
| SimpleBench | 67.6% | 61.1% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 92.1% | 83.1% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 94% | 84.7% |
| Chess Puzzles | 17% | 40% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1527 | 1465 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 25% | 26% |
| DTBench | 91.2% | 89.1% |
| LMCA | 55.8% | 43.1% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 155.36 | 151.83 |
| ForecastBench | 60 | 58.5 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 83.6% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 7.6% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | 80.6% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 12.7% | — |

## Math

- Claude Opus 4.6: 62.7 (#25)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 51.4 (#42)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 66% | 51.2% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 26.8% | 17.1% |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 78.5% | 67.6% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 94.4% | 95.6% |
| ProofBench | 50% | 15% |
| LMArena Math | 1517 | 1472 |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 40.7% | 35.6% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 22.9% | 4.2% |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 4.6: 61.8 (#23)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 58.8 (#30)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | 89.4% |
| SimpleQA Verified | 47% | 66.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.2% | 13.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1546 | 1461 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 34.4% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 4.6: 37.0 (#67)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 45.3 (#15)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1316 | 1285 |
| LMArena Document | 1507 | 1413 |
| GeoBench | — | 88% |
| VPCT | — | 72.6% |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | — | 0% |
| Furniture Assembly | 28.3% | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 4.6: 58.2 (#4)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 55.9 (#26)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1490 | 1458 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1551 | 1510 |
| LMArena French | 1513 | 1478 |
| LMArena German | 1504 | 1497 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1484 | 1488 |
| LMArena Korean | 1465 | 1443 |
| LMArena Russian | 1497 | 1480 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1512 | 1470 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 4.6: 79.7 (#3)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 75.8 (#52)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1523 | 1437 |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 44.4 (#63)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1520 | 1452 |
| CL-bench | 20.7% | — |
| CL-bench Life | 17% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 4.6: 73.7 (#9)
- Gemini 3 Flash Preview: 65.6 (#44)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1504 | 1466 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1506 | 1457 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1514 | 1471 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1809 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1223 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Gemini 3 Flash Preview?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.3 to 52.3 on the Noometry Index. Gemini 3 Flash Preview costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Gemini 3 Flash Preview?

Gemini 3 Flash Preview is cheaper. It lists at $0.50 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 4.6 or Gemini 3 Flash Preview better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.7 versus 51.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Gemini 3 Flash Preview does, with 1.05M tokens against 1M.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3 Flash Preview share?

51 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Gemini 3 Flash Preview has 59.