Anthropic API vs Google Gemini API
API for Claude — frontier models for chat, tool use, agents, and long-context reasoning
vs. Gemini 2.5 Pro, Flash, Flash-Lite — multimodal + 2M context
Pricing tiers
Anthropic API
Opus 4.7 — usage
Input $5 / output $25 / cache-write $6.25 / cache-read $0.50 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Sonnet 4.6 — usage
Input $3 / output $15 / cache-write $3.75 / cache-read $0.30 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Haiku 4.5 — usage
Input $1 / output $5 / cache-write $1.25 / cache-read $0.10 per 1M tokens. Batch = 50% off.
Custom
Google Gemini API
Free Tier (AI Studio)
Generous free tier with rate limits. Good for dev + prototyping. Data may be used to improve Google products.
Free
Paid API (Gemini API)
Pay-as-you-go per-token. Data NOT used for training.
$0 base (usage-based)
Vertex AI (GCP)
Enterprise deployment via Google Cloud. Same pricing structure + GCP features (IAM, VPC-SC, CMEK).
$0 base (usage-based)
Gemini Enterprise
Custom. Gemini 2.5 Deep Think model access + Google Workspace + Agentspace.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing opus-4-7 on Anthropic API vs free-tier on Google Gemini API.
| Metric | Anthropic API | Google Gemini API |
|---|---|---|
| discount batch | 50 % off | — |
Features
Anthropic API · 0 features
Google Gemini API · 11 features
- Batch API — 50% discount for async processing.
- Code Execution — Python code interpreter tool (sandboxed).
- Context Caching — Cache system instructions + tools for up to 90% savings.
- File API — Upload large files (up to 2 GB) for multimodal prompts.
- Function Calling — JSON schema-based tool calling. Parallel supported.
- generateContent API — Core generation endpoint.
- Grounding with Search — Augment answers with Google Search results. Fact-checked citations returned.
- Model Tuning — Supervised fine-tuning via AI Studio.
- Multimodal Live API — Bidirectional streaming voice + video (WebSocket).
- Safety Settings — Configurable thresholds for harm categories.
- streamGenerateContent — Streaming variant with SSE.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Anthropic API | Google Gemini API |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Claude Code CLI | — |
| SDK | Go SDK, Java SDK, Python SDK, Ruby SDK, TypeScript SDK (@anthropic-ai/sdk) | @google/genai, google-genai-go, google-genai (Python) |
| REST | AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure AI, REST API (Messages + Agents) | Gemini REST API, Vertex AI Endpoint |
| MCP | — | Gemini MCP |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Anthropic API and Google Gemini API are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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