Claude Pro vs Gemini Pro: which plan gives more for your money

Claude Pro costs $20 per month and Google AI Pro costs $19.99, so price will not decide this. What decides it is the work you do. For writing-heavy work I would pick Claude Pro, because Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs less per task than Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on email replies, proofreading and invoice extraction. Spreadsheet analysis is the exception, where Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview was cheaper in my measurements.

What each plan includes

Both plans sit in the same price band, so the comparison comes down to what you get for that money.

Claude Pro, $20 per month: more usage than the free tier, Claude Code included, and Fable available only through usage credits.
Google AI Pro, $19.99 per month: 4x higher usage limits than the free tier, 1,000 Google Flow Credits, 5 TB of cloud storage, and higher limits for the Jules coding agent.

The official pricing pages give no absolute usage number for Claude Pro, and Google only states its limits relative to the free tier. I can't tell you which plan allows more messages before a cap. Check both pages before you buy if message volume matters to you.

If you need more capacity, the next tiers are:

Claude Max 5x, $100 per month: 5x more usage than Pro, plus $100 per month in API credits for the Claude Platform.
Google AI Ultra (5x), $99.99 per month: 5x higher usage limits than AI Pro.

Only the Claude tier bundles API credits, which matters for the per-token comparison below.

What the same tasks cost through the API

A subscription is one fixed payment. The alternative is paying per token. The figures below are the equivalent API cost of four common tasks at list price, so you can see what the same work would cost outside a plan.

List prices per 1M tokens (input / output / cached input):

Claude Sonnet 5.5: $2.00 / $10.00 / $0.10, 1,000,000-token context, reasoning always on, LMArena Text score 1475.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview: $2.00 / $12.00 / $0.20, 1,048,576-token context, reasoning always on, LMArena Text score 1487.

Cost per task from my measurements (see /methodology/):

Task	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (per task / per 1,000)	Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (per task / per 1,000)
Reply to a customer email	0.40¢ / $3.97	0.97¢ / $9.72
Proofread one 500-word page	1.1¢ / $11.10	3.6¢ / $35.78
Extract data from an invoice	1.0¢ / $10.30	3.2¢ / $31.94
Analyze a 200-row spreadsheet	17¢ / $170.87	7.5¢ / $75.49

All eight figures are measured runs, one run per task at default settings.

The spreadsheet row needs a caveat. The Claude Sonnet 5.5 run hit the 16,000-token output cap. It produced 0 visible output tokens and 16,000 reasoning tokens, and reasoning tokens are billed as output. That is why it cost more than Gemini there. It is the only one of the four tasks where Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview was cheaper.

Gemini's cost on the shorter tasks comes mostly from reasoning. On the proofreading task it used 2,211 reasoning tokens against 653 visible output tokens, while Claude Sonnet 5.5 used 0 reasoning tokens.

For context, the median of all 334 models on the email reply task is 0.11¢. Both models sit well above it, which is the usual price of a frontier model. If a task does not need one, cheaper models do the same job for much less.

#	Model	Cost per task	Text score	Tokens in / out	Basis
1	GPT-6 LunaOpenAI	0.04¢$0.45 / 1,000	1443	718 / 755	measured best value
2	GLM 5.3 FlashZ.ai	0.05¢$0.51 / 1,000	1474	730 / 797	measured best value
3	Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic	0.07¢$0.71 / 1,000	-	987 / 1,217	measured
4	Qwen3.8 FlashAlibaba Qwen	0.10¢$0.98 / 1,000	-	777 / 1,830	measured
5	GPT-5.4 NanoOpenAI	0.11¢$1.09 / 1,000	1401	718 / 755	estimated
6	GLM 5.3Z.ai	0.12¢$1.17 / 1,000	1478	730 / 797	estimated best value
7	MiMo-V2.6-ProXiaomi	0.13¢$1.32 / 1,000	1479	881 / 1,072	estimated best value
8	Llama 4 MaverickMeta	0.13¢$1.33 / 1,000	1327	770 / 1,824	estimated

Writing-heavy work

Email replies and proofreading are mostly chat-window tasks, where a flat plan is the natural way to pay because you are not counting tokens. If you ever moved the work to the API, a proofread would cost 1.1¢ on Claude Sonnet 5.5 against 3.6¢ on Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview. The email reply gap runs the same direction: 0.40¢ against 0.97¢.

I would pick Claude Pro for writing. The plan costs $20, and the model behind it is cheaper per task on both writing tasks.

Data-heavy and long-document work

Here the result is mixed. Invoice extraction cost 1.0¢ on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 3.2¢ on Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview. Spreadsheet analysis flipped: 17¢ on Claude against 7.5¢ on Gemini, with the Claude run hitting the output cap.

A subscription hides these per-task costs, and neither plan publishes its included usage as a task count. Spreadsheets and long documents use far more tokens than chat. The spreadsheet task used 6,304 input tokens on Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and 5,433 on Claude Sonnet 5.5, against a few hundred for an email reply. So heavy data work will reach plan limits sooner than chat does.

Both models offer context windows of roughly 1,000,000 tokens or more, so a long document is not blocked by context size. Usage limits are the constraint to check.

#	Model	Cost per task	Text score	Tokens in / out	Basis
1	GPT-6 LunaOpenAI	0.19¢$1.87 / 1,000	1443	4,779 / 2,794	measured best value
2	GPT-5.4 NanoOpenAI	0.44¢$4.45 / 1,000	1401	4,779 / 2,794	estimated
3	Mistral Small 4Mistral	0.71¢$7.14 / 1,000	-	4,774 / 10,700	estimated
4	Qwen3.8 FlashAlibaba Qwen	≥0.85¢$8.47 / 1,000	-	6,357 / 16,000	measured capped
5	Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic	≥0.85¢$8.54 / 1,000	-	5,433 / 16,000	measured capped
6	DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek	≥0.86¢$8.64 / 1,000	1475	4,801 / 16,000	measured best value capped

When a plan beats paying per token

A plan wins when your usage is steady, interactive and below the plan's limit. You pay a fixed amount and stop tracking requests. Claude Pro at $20 suits someone who writes emails, drafts text and proofreads pages through the day.

Per-token billing wins when your volume is bursty, when you run batch jobs, or when you want to pick a cheaper model for each step. Claude Max 5x includes $100 per month in API credits, which helps heavier Claude users, but check the official page for how those credits apply before assuming they cover your own API work. You can model your own volume in the calculator.

My recommendation

Mostly writing and email: Claude Pro. It costs $20 per month, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 is cheaper per task than Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on both writing tasks.
Mostly invoices and documents: Claude Pro again looks cheaper per task on extraction, but compare usage limits first, since neither plan publishes a task count.
Mostly spreadsheets: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview was cheaper in my run, so Google AI Pro is worth a trial. The Claude result was inflated by the output cap.
Heavy API use: skip the subscription comparison and price the work per token. See Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview for the full price data.

FAQ

Is Claude Pro cheaper than Google AI Pro?

No, but the gap is a cent: Claude Pro is $20 per month and Google AI Pro is $19.99. Decide on what each plan includes, not on price.

Which plan is better for proofreading and email replies?

I would pick Claude Pro. On the API, proofreading one 500-word page costs 1.1¢ on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 3.6¢ on Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview.

When should I pay per token instead of subscribing?

Pay per token when your work is batched, bursty or large enough that API prices matter. A subscription suits steady, interactive use within the plan's limits.