ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo vs Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-12.
| ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo | Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | bytedance-seed | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.50/M | $0.75/M |
| Output Price | $2.50/M | $3.75/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Seed 2.1 Turbo costs $1.12 and Gemini 3.6 Flash costs $1.69, so Seed 2.1 Turbo is about 1.5 times cheaper for the same work.
Gemini 3.6 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Seed 2.1 Turbo.
Only Gemini 3.6 Flash offers audio input.
Across the 18 tasks where they differ, Seed 2.1 Turbo scores higher on 4 (Regex Writing, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), Gemini 3.6 Flash on 14 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Seed 2.1 Turbo was released in August 2026 and Gemini 3.6 Flash in July 2026.
Pick Seed 2.1 Turbo if you need lower cost; pick Gemini 3.6 Flash if you need long documents, audio input or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo | Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 133 |
| Code Review | 126 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 128 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 127 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 130 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 125 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 117 | 120 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 122 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 128 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 129 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 118 | 121 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →