Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Argon

Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$4.40/1M · 1M ctx
Gemini 4 Argon
Google · Frontier · Proprietary
$4.40/1M · 1.0M ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Sonnet 5.5
Gemini 4 Argon
Maker
Anthropic
Google
Blended price / 1M
$4.40
$4.40
Input / output
$2.00 in · $10 out / 1M tokens
$2.00 in · $10 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
1.0M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.8
9.3
Agentic Ability
9.7
9.4
Speed
8.4
7.5
Value for money
6.7
5.4
Reliability
9.4
9.2

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Sonnet 5.5 or Gemini 4 Argon?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Sonnet 5.5 if you want the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 for the hardest tasks. Choose Gemini 4 Argon if you want hard coding and agent steps where you want a frontier model outside the Claude and GPT families.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads in 5 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed, value for money and reliability), while Gemini 4 Argon leads in 0. On price, Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs about $4.40 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Gemini 4 Argon is about $4.40 and proprietary.

Where Sonnet 5.5 falls short
  • Artificial Analysis flags it as very verbose, which adds output tokens
  • A cache miss bills input at $2 per million, 20 times the cache-read rate
Full Sonnet 5.5 breakdown →
Where Gemini 4 Argon falls short
  • Price doubles to $4/$20 per million on December 1, 2026
  • Not available on the Gemini API free tier or the Google AI Pro plan, per Google
Full Gemini 4 Argon breakdown →

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Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models are included with Standard Compute

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Current frontier models Claude Opus 5.5 · Claude Sonnet 5.5

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