Both cost about $20 a month and both handle everyday questions well. What differs is what comes with the plan. Gemini is a Google bundle: storage, free images, video, and Gemini inside Gmail and Docs. Claude is one tool, with chat and a coding agent on one allowance, no images, and connectors that reach Gmail and Drive from outside.
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Pick Claude if most of your work is writing, long documents or code, and you want a coding agent inside the same $20 rather than storage, images and video you would not use.
Pick Gemini if your mail, files and photos already live in Google, you want free images, or you want a cheap step up, because Google AI Plus is $4.99 and Claude has nothing between free and $20.
Pick neither if you ask a few questions a week, because both free plans already cover that, and neither paid plan tells you in numbers what the extra money buys.
prices checked 2026-10-13 · by dan scutaru
| Claude | Gemini | |
|---|---|---|
| price | free tier · from $20/mo | free tier · from $4.99/mo |
| free tier | Chat, web search, file creation, code execution, memory and up to 5 projects, on Sonnet and Haiku, with a rolling five-hour usage window. No Claude Code, no Research, no Opus or Fable models, no image generation. | Free with a Google account: Gemini Flash, varying access to the Pro model, image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas and Gems. 32K token context window, compute-based limits that refresh every 5 hours until a weekly limit is reached. No video generation on the free plan. |
| runs on | web, ios, android, mac, windows, linux | web, ios, android, mac, windows |
| the $20 plan | Pro, $20 a month or $200 for a year. The newest Fable models cost extra. | Google AI Pro, $19.99 a month, monthly only, with 5 TB storage. |
| plans above it | Max at $100 (5x Pro) or $200 (20x). | Ultra at $99.99 (5x AI Pro) or $199.99 (20x). |
| usage limits | Five-hour session plus a weekly limit, shared by chat and Claude Code. No counts. | Refreshes every 5 hours until a weekly limit. No counts, and limits "may change without notice". |
| context window | Up to 1M tokens on paid plans, by model. | 32K free, 128K on AI Plus, 1M on AI Pro. |
| Google apps | Gmail, Calendar and Drive connectors on every plan, Free included. | Inside Gmail from AI Plus, inside Docs from AI Pro. |
Claude is the simpler buy if you want the agent inside the plan you already pay for. Claude Code comes with Pro and spends the same allowance as your chats, on a five-hour window plus a weekly limit.
Google splits it up. Gemini CLI was replaced by Antigravity CLI on 18 June 2026, Antigravity has a free tier with "basic weekly rate limits" and more on AI Pro, and Jules is a separate agent. Neither company publishes counts. Give both the same real bug before you pay.
Claude Pro buys more of one thing: higher limits, Claude Code, Research, the Opus models and projects past the free plan's five. Anthropic's newest Fable models are not included and run on usage credits from the first message.
Google AI Pro is a bundle: 4x the free limits, a 1 million token window, Gemini in Gmail and Docs, video, 5 TB of storage. If you already pay Google for storage, the AI comes close to free. If not, compare only the assistants. If ChatGPT is on your list too, our Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini page puts all three side by side.
On Hacker News the split is chat against code. For chat, Gemini has more room: one user said its free limit "basically never run out" for them, unlike Claude. For code, nobody is relaxed. One developer moved code generation from Claude to Gemini when usage ran out, but kept Claude's Opus for planning. Another, on Google AI Pro, used a week of Antigravity quota in two prompts.
People rarely leave over answer quality. They leave the one that stopped them mid-task.
For writing, long documents and code inside one $20 plan, most comparison pages lean Claude. For images, video, storage and a $4.99 entry plan, Gemini is the better buy. On everyday questions most people cannot tell them apart.
No. Anthropic's help centre says Claude does not generate photos or illustrations. It draws charts and diagrams in HTML and SVG and reads images you upload. Gemini makes and edits images on its free plan.
Yes, with a Google account, including image generation and Deep Research. The context window is 32K tokens, and free users are limited first when Google runs short of capacity. The full answer →
Google publishes multipliers, not numbers: AI Plus gets 2x the free limits, AI Pro 4x, Ultra 5x or 20x AI Pro. Usage refreshes every 5 hours until a weekly limit, and paid users who run out continue on Flash-Lite.