Gemini 1.5 Pro vs GPT-5 Nano: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google) and GPT-5 Nano (OpenAI) comes down to three things: per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload. Gemini 1.5 Pro costs $1.25/M input vs $0.05/M for GPT-5 Nano; context windows are 2.0M vs 400K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.

Side-by-side specs

SpecGemini 1.5 ProGPT-5 Nano
ProviderGoogleOpenAI
Released2024-02-152025-08-07
Input price $1.25/M $0.05/M
Output price $5.00/M $0.40/M
Cached input $0.3100/M $0.0050/M
Context window 2.0M 400K
Max output 8K 64K
Modalities text image audio video text
Tokenizer gemini o200k_base

Capability matrix

CapabilityGemini 1.5 ProGPT-5 Nano
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
vision Yes No
streaming Yes Yes
audio Yes No
video Yes No

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)Gemini 1.5 ProGPT-5 NanoCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.003750 $0.000250 GPT-5 Nano by $0.003500
RAG (4K / 500) $0.007500 $0.000400 GPT-5 Nano by $0.007100
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.030000 $0.001400 GPT-5 Nano by $0.028600
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.132500 $0.005600 GPT-5 Nano by $0.126900

When to choose Gemini 1.5 Pro over GPT-5 Nano

  • Larger context window (2.0M vs 400K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
  • Supports vision — GPT-5 Nano does not.
  • Supports audio — GPT-5 Nano does not.
  • Supports video — GPT-5 Nano does not.

When to choose GPT-5 Nano over Gemini 1.5 Pro

  • Per-token input cost is 96% lower than Gemini 1.5 Pro.

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