Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Google: Gemini 3.6 Flash | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | x-ai | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 91.2 |
| Input Price | $0.75/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $3.75/M | $6.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 500,000 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 450,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 88.8 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 75.4 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 100.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemini 3.6 Flash costs $1.69 and Grok 4.5 costs $3.50, so Gemini 3.6 Flash is about 2.1 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 750 pages for Grok 4.5.
Only Gemini 3.6 Flash offers audio input and video input.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores higher on 2 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling), Grok 4.5 on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Gemini 3.6 Flash if you need lower cost, long documents, audio input or video input; pick Grok 4.5 if you need 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 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 171 |
| Code Review | 132 | 167 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 164 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 180 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 154 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 142 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 135 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 144 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 146 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 170 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 154 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 154 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 128 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 146 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 146 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 159 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 140 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →