Pricing

Gemini is about 10x cheaper per token. But for some reason it's using 8 times more input tokens than CC. They also have this thing called cached tokens, which is much cheaper than not cached tokens. It's a hot cache of your context on Google side, cached automatically. So at the end of the day you don't know how much you'll pay.

Models

Google is good for very complex topics and when the conversation is short. But both models are great. I prefer Claude and Sonnet 4.5 is great all around

CLI tools

Gemini cli is at it's very early days. Doesn't support hooks or subagents. Often runs into loops it can't break out from, essentially gets stuck but you still pay for the tokens.

Claude is just great. Allows you to write complex workflows they way they are supposed to be written. Handles hooks and subagents. MD file can reference another MD file, so you can DRY your files.

Nested plan mode works weird, sometimes the agent gets stuck if it asks for plan approval and thinks it's executing it, but displays nothing... So plan mode is not fully supported in subagents.

A nice thing is that .Claude directory is automatically understood by codex or cursor, you should be able to run your Claude command using openai models via codex or maybe even other providers via Cursor.

Summary

Overall Claude is the best all around, but the tokens are crazy expensive and the subscription model is a joke. You don't know how many tokens you can use when you're subscribed, but it's 'something', and last week they changed the limits, it's suddenly half of 'something'...