Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) vs Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) when you need audio input.
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch)
Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$8.75
$65.63
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $56.88
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$8.50
$63.75
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $55.25
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$9.00
$67.50
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $58.50
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$5.50
$41.25
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $35.75
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$2.75
$20.63
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $17.88
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch)
Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
✓ Yes
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
✓ Yes
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-08.
Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-03.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) if…
cost matters at scale — it is 87% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($8.75 vs $65.63 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response
Choose Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) if…
you need audio input — to take speech or audio directly; Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) does not advertise it
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) does not advertise it
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) better than Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)?
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) when you need audio input. In short: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) when cost matters at scale, you generate long outputs in one go; Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) when you need audio input, you need seed (reproducible sampling).
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) is cheaper: $0.10 vs $0.75 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 87% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $8.75 against $65.63.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) costs $0.05 per 1M input tokens and $0.25 per 1M output tokens; Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) costs $0.38 input and $1.88 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)?
Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch): 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch).
Do Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) support function calling and JSON output?
Can Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch)?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) up to 66K (about 49,200 words).
When were Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) released?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) was listed on 2026-10-07; Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash (batch) on 2026-09-02.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's small, fast model for high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summarization, subagents, and browser use. It succeeds Claude Haiku 4.5 with stronger coding, computer use, and...
Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's most intelligent Flash model with significant gains from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and multi-step reasoning.