Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-22.
| Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | openai | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.8 | 70.0 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $2.50/M | $12.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 1,050,000 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 36.6 | 69.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite costs $0.93 and GPT-5.6 Terra costs $5.00, so Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite is about 5.4 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,048,576 and 1,050,000 tokens, about 1,573 and 1,575 pages.
Only Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite offers audio input and video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra leads 70.0 to 31.8.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), GPT-5.6 Terra on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite if you need lower cost, audio input or video input; pick GPT-5.6 Terra if you need benchmark performance 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 | Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 138 | 140 |
| Code Review | 139 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 118 |
| Code Refactoring | 141 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 143 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 128 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 134 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 123 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 124 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 126 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 129 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 135 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 133 | 137 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 121 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 117 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 132 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 132 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 143 | 147 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 125 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 128 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →