Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-21.
| Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ||
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 31.8 |
| Input Price | $0.75/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $3.75/M | $2.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 36.6 |
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 Gemini 3.6 Flash costs $1.69, so Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite is about 1.8 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite if you need lower cost 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 3.6 Flash | Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 138 |
| Code Review | 132 | 139 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 141 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 143 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 128 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 134 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 124 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 126 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 129 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 133 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 128 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 132 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 132 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 143 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 125 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →