Claude vs Gemini for coding: Claude leads 61.7 to 53.2 on the coding agent index, and Gemini costs half as much per task

Is Claude or Gemini better for coding?

Claude is better for coding when the work runs through an agent. Artificial Analysis put each lab's own agent through the same 290 tasks. When we read its Coding Agent Index on 25 October 2026, Claude Code with Opus in it beat Google's Antigravity CLI with Gemini 4 Argon on all three of the tests.

Each of the tests checks a different part of the job. FrontierCode comes from Cognition, and it asks if a maintainer would merge the change that an agent made to a real repo. It has 100 tasks. Terminal-Bench 4.0 gives the agent 66 hard jobs to do in a shell. SWE-Atlas QnA, from Scale AI, asks it 124 questions about how a codebase works. That's where Claude's lead is widest, at 10.8 points.

Claude Sonnet, which costs half as much per token as Opus, wins too. With Sonnet in it, Claude Code scored 59.3, and its 66.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 is the best of any agent on that test. Each of the three tests has the same weight in the index, and Artificial Analysis warns on its Coding Agent Index page that the index "is useful for quick comparison, but it should be read alongside the per-eval breakdowns." So read the rows, not only the total.

Is Gemini better than Claude at the same effort setting?

Gemini 4 Argon beats Claude Opus on two of the three model tests when both run at high effort. Artificial Analysis only tests Argon at that one setting. On its model boards, Argon scored 57.1% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and Opus at high scored 56.6%. On SciCode it was 61.8% to 60.4%.

Opus pulls ahead once you turn it up. At max effort it passes 59.6% of the terminal jobs and 66.9% of the SciCode tasks, and there's no max setting for Argon to answer with. FrontierCode is the odd one out. Opus at high scored 54.0% on it, which is more than 10 points clear of Argon at 43.5%.

The agent around the model matters too. Argon scored 43.5% on FrontierCode in the test harness that Artificial Analysis built, and 48.6% when it ran inside Antigravity CLI. That's a 5 point gain from Google's own agent. Opus at max gained a bit less in Claude Code, from 52.2% to 56.0%.

Which coding agent comes with a $20 plan, Claude Code or Antigravity?

Both of the $20 plans come with a coding agent as of October 2026: Claude Pro has Claude Code, and Google AI Pro has Antigravity and Jules. Google charges $19.99 a month for its plan. Anthropic charges $20, or $17 a month if you pay for a year.

Neither company puts a number on its agent limits. Anthropic's Claude Code help page says: "These limits are shared across Claude and Claude Code, meaning all activity in both tools counts against the same limits." So a long chat about a bug eats into your agent time. Google's Antigravity plans page promises Pro "a high, generous quota, refreshed every five hours until the weekly limit is reached." That's all it says.

Gemini CLI isn't the consumer agent any more. Google's maintainers posted on GitHub on 19 May 2026: "On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro and Ultra". Free users were cut off the same day and sent to Antigravity CLI. A Claude Code vs Gemini CLI test from before June doesn't tell you what a personal account gets today.

Google's free plan is the better one for code. You can start on Antigravity for nothing, per its pricing page, but Claude Free doesn't come with Claude Code at all. The catch is the context. The free Gemini app holds 32K tokens, per Google's limits page, and you need Google AI Pro to get it up to 1M.

How do Claude and Gemini compare on SWE-bench?

SWE-bench can't rank today's Claude and Gemini, because neither board lists them. The official SWE-bench Verified board has no entry after 26 February 2026, and that last entry is a Gemini 3 model. Scale's SWE-bench Pro board stops at Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

On that Pro board, read 25 October 2026, Anthropic's best entry scored 51.90% and Google's best 46.10%. Claude led there too. But both of them are a generation old, so a SWE-bench table that crowns a winner is ranking the models that came before these.

Which is cheaper for coding, Claude or Gemini?

Gemini is cheaper for coding, at about half the cost of each agent task. In the Coding Agent Index, Antigravity with Argon spent $5.86 of API cost on an average task. Claude Code spent $11.42 with Opus in it, and $13.30 with Sonnet.

The token price gap is about to close. Google's Gemini API pricing page lists Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output through 30 November 2026. From 1 December it's $4 and $20. That's the same as Claude Opus on Anthropic's pricing page.

That wipes out Gemini's edge. Every Argon rate doubles on 1 December, cached input included ($0.10 to $0.20). By our arithmetic, $5.86 times two, the same index runs would then cost about $11.72 a task, level with Opus at $11.42. Argon writes fewer tokens than Opus, but both read about 14 million tokens per task, and reading is most of the bill. On a plan, the two cost the same. Google AI Pro is $19.99 a month and Claude Pro is $20.

Is Claude or Gemini faster for coding?

Gemini gets agent tasks done faster. It took Antigravity with Argon 34.7 minutes on an average task in the index. It took Claude Code 61.0 minutes with Opus, and 79.7 with Sonnet.

A single answer is the other way round. On the model leaderboard, Opus at high effort took a median 36.5 seconds to go from your prompt to a full reply, and Argon took 63.2. Both of them stream at about 80 tokens a second once they start. Most of Argon's wait is the thinking it does before the first word.

Should you use Claude or Gemini for coding?

Use Claude when the code has to pass review, and Gemini when you want cheaper, quicker agent runs.

Neither one wins every row, so test both on your own repo before you pay. For the wider match on writing and research, read Claude vs Gemini. For OpenAI's agent on the same index, ChatGPT vs Gemini for coding puts Codex against Antigravity. For other coding tools, ChatGPT alternatives for coding covers them.

Whizi fits one narrow case: you want Claude Opus and a Gemini model to answer the same coding question before you choose a plan. Side by side chats come with Whizi Pro at $29.99 a month, and credits per message vary by model and can change. Whizi is a chat app, so for edits across a repo you'll still want Claude Code or Antigravity. The coding guide shows which coding models each plan reaches.