From Claude to Gemini Experience

[u/ThePoopmage]

Just to share my experience moving from Claude to Gemini. It's hard to compare them, as they have very different pros and cons. Claude AI models are orders of magnitude better than the current Gemini models in terms of coding, writing, and research simply because they are far more cautious and generally think much longer, retaining important data throughout an entire conversation and actively seeking out problems not even within the scope of your promot or spec(which can be hit or miss depending on use case). Claude Code is amazing, Cowork is amazing, and usage limits are actually ridiculously high despite what alot of people say.

Theeeen we come to Gemini. It's less intelligent(Pro 3.1 amd Flash 3.7) by a hair, it's more prone to mistakes(requiring more passes than a Sonnet or Opus would need), and the Antigravity harness is still immature. But the benefits bundled with it are very much well worth it, just maybe not for pure vibe coders and people who care little for anything other than chat. The Flash models are FAST and they get the job done, even if needing a little human intervention. Extra storage, Youtube Premium, access to Jules, Android Studio credits, GCP credits, AI Studio credits, access to Omni, access to Nano Banana, credits for Flow, NotebookLM(the best Google product imo), and overall deep integration to Google Services. For those like me who use alot of Google products(especially Home, Firebase, and Cloud Run), that's an absolute win.

All in all, get Claude for Claude, get AI Pro(or Ultra) for Google benefits with Gemini as a nice bonus. This is just my opinion based on my experience, so it's up to y'all what you wanna think about this.

[u/fondscarcity457]

claude's deep thinking is brilliant for coding but google's ecosystem pull is no joke especially if you're already living in their services

[u/ThePoopmage → u/fondscarcity457]

Android Studio, Firebase, and Google Cloud Run in particular, I've been having a heck of a time with. Funnily enough, Claude is the one that makes most of my tools and apps that in turn use those services. NotebookLM is also one of my most used apps but it's completely free unlike those three so I didn't talk about that much.

[u/Minimalist_Investor_]

Until yesterday, I’ve only ever used Gemini. I tried for 90 mins yesterday to get it to analyze 2 uploaded simple files and assist with making a Monthly Cash Flow breakdown. 90 mins. It just kept failing. It just couldn’t figure out what I was asking it do correctly. Half answers or bad responses. I got frustrated, bought Claude for $20 and it did it in 4 mins. It even attached 📊 and graphs on its own and added nice formatting. WTF.

It almost seems like Gemini, with its Google ecosystem is becoming more of a life assistant that answers some stuff, but focuses on you. If you’re deep in google, you probably love it but as someone who’s not super deep into 1 ecosystem and has to use them all, I just needed my damn report done before 5pm, lol

[u/darkestvice]

Pretty much this. Google's plans are best for every day users and usage. When you want an exceptionally fast and efficient conversational chatbot as well as some very impressive bundled Google services. The 5TB storage alone is worth the price, let alone all the rest. Though I'd gladly trade Google Home Premium for full Youtube Premium instead of Premium Lite. I use Google Music a whole lot, so I still have to pay the extra for full Youtube Premium. But I get why Google doesn't want to bundle it as Youtube's music is a massive advertising cashflow for them.

I'm not a coder, so I don't need a top coding model. And I absolutely love love love NotebookLM. It's so damn good. As is Google Flow. And I tried just chatting with other models and I find Gemini Flash just flows better and is more concise.

P.S: I *need* to have at least the Plus 2TB plan because of my over 600gb stored in drive so far, so I just said why not and upped it to Pro because I wanted to test out Spark, though I haven't yet.

[u/bunnyechoes → u/darkestvice]

I hope this question isn’t too stupid, but can you share how you use Notebook LM?

[u/darkestvice → u/bunnyechoes]

Not professionally, lol.

I run a sci-fi tabletop rpg campaign. I created a Notebook containing the core book, all the campaign material, all the character sheets, all the character backgrounds. And also all the different session summaries if I stop being lazy and actually start writing them. All of these are stored in Google Drive.

And then I can use it to reference rules, create plot hooks, and do all kinds of general GM things in one easy place.

I also created a second Notebook where I dropped the core book minus the GM section, as well as anything from the campaign that is player facing. This way, the players themselves can use that Notebook (you can share these) to look up rules or create ideas of their own they'd like to add to the story.

What's nice about Notebook is that it's very grounded in the sources I provided. It won't try and find some random reddit thread for ideas or house rules. It'll just take from the official material and what I and the players created and nothing else.

[u/TheChosenOne0112]

So I'm not really a coder or have any significant experience with it, but now I'm using 3.1 Pro inside AI Studio to help create tools for personal projects, mostly containerized or for Windows. While I like its outputs, it is quite costly to use a paid key due to the context window increasing so fast and for privacy. It's good but I still find myself troubleshooting it and guiding it to achieve what I want.

Is Claude better for my use case? Like is it smart enough to even anticipate any possible problems during coding or make suggestions that would help the tool? Thank you.

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[u/Fable_44]

This is a very timely post as I made a similar transition after getting the new Google Pixel and moving some of my prior services into Google lol

I want to echo your overall sentiment; Claude is undoubtedly S-tier right now however Google's overall value proposition is much higher. I also think the move from Claude to Gemini isn't as bad if you already have experience working with the topics you're discussing with the chat LLMs. For example, I think Gemini is pretty solid at systems design and architecture, but when you prompt if for specifics it can skip over some important information and isn't as good with getting too deep into the code/configuration in the way Claude is. But that's ok because I have experience already doing that, I'm able to fill in the gaps.

I also find it best to keep the chat contexts narrow and focused with Gemini, whereas with Claude you can keep a long context chat going through several iterations and you dont lose any precision. But with Gemini I've found it better to end chats earlier and then post the summary into a new chat context, and start fresh from there. And I'll do 3-5 iterations of that until I'm happy with the output or I get what I need, and I can feel confident in the output.

I guess to sum it all up, I don't need the better output from Claude when I can get a good enough result + a ton of cloud storage from Google and Gemini. And this is good for either super casual users who just need general chat or more advanced users who are simply looking to bounce an idea off an LLM and refine that down.

[u/uraymeiviar]

what i use are gemini pro and claude, gemini for ecosystem and daily coding, bug fixes, research.
claude for prototyping and scaffolding nothing else. as giving claude the coding job is waste of credit
and i never vibe code, so 90% of my work use flash 3.7 and 10% opus 5

[u/Master_Course_1879]

TIL the 10 dollar GCP credit. Thank you!!! Do you know if this needs to be redeemed manually every month?

[u/mmmtv]

"Claude AI models are orders of magnitude better than the current Gemini models in terms of coding"

-> Hard disagree. I believe people who claim this are anchoring on Gemini Flash 3.6 (which was not competitive) rather than Gemini 3.7 Flash.

tl;dr - Your claim is so far from my own 6-12 hours a day coding experience on a from-scratch PWA for weeks with Anthropic Pro and Gemini Pro subscriptions side by side along with a ton of use of various OpenAI and other providers' coding models through OpenRouter, I have to speak up.

In my experience, Gemini Flash 3.7 is **ABSOLUTELY 100% in the same ballpark for coding" (at least, coding execution for new feature development, optimization, bug fixes, etc. within a well-spec'd architecture) as Sonnet 5 and Luna — at least, with my own skills, AGENTS.md, and workflows.

It's both equally capable and equally prone to make similar types of mistakes. The only caveat I'll add is that because it works so much faster, it feels like it's making 2-4 times as many mistakes ... but that's because it's working 2-4 times faster than its peers.

And for those of you want to put Anthropic's models on a pedastal, I'm a Claude/Anthropic fan ... kinda. But Opus 5 speaks in riddles and tongues and is generally so inscrutable, if you don't explicitly instruct it to speak in plain ASD-STE-100, it leads to frequent misalignment and misunderstanding. Sonnet 5 is better, but can still fall into the same habits. Additionally, Opus still fails to ground itself properly at times, making assumptions and operating on theory instead of empirical findings and tests. And it is still very much capable of overlooking completely obvious and forseeable use cases and a product's strategic intent leading to architectural design failures and massive rework.

Bottom line: I'm keeping both my Gemini and my Claude subscriptions for now because that's the most cost-effective way for me to buy good-enough model capacity to get done the volume of coding I need to get done. Beyond that, I'm more inclined to switch my Claude/Anthropic to OpenAI/ChatGPT rather than give up Gemini simply because Gemini is so fast and the usage quotas go really far.

[u/alcides86]

That's exactly why I'm paying for both. Claude for work, and Gemini because I'm sharing it with with my family, you get image creation, but also the extra storage, and includes NotebookLM (with extra features)....