Undominated.ai

Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google LMArena 1457.3 $3.44/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28

4 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 9 score at least as high as Gemini 2.5 Pro and cost no more under at least one workload. 4 match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. 5 do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Gemini 2.5 Pro, it is not generated.

Where it holds

WorkloadGemini 2.5 Pro $/MBetter and cheaperWith a trade
Balanced$3.4445
Summarise$1.3734
Chat$4.4145
Code gen$6.4145
Agentic$1.8945

Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

What you would be replacing

Intelligence1457.3
Context window1.0M
Max output66K
Input modestext, image, file, audio, video
Tool useyes
Extended reasoningyes

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Better and cheaper, nothing given up 4

Each of these matches or beats Gemini 2.5 Pro on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

#ModelIntelligence$/MHolds under
1Gemini 3.7 Flash Google1490.2 +32.9$0.750
  • Balanced −78%
  • Summarise −74%
  • Chat −80%
  • Code gen −81%
  • Agentic −79%
2Gemini 3.5 Flash Google1482.6 +25.3$3.38
  • Balanced −2%
  • Chat −7%
  • Code gen −8%
  • Agentic −4%
3Muse Spark 1.1 Meta1478.3 +21$2.00
  • Balanced −42%
  • Summarise −21%
  • Chat −52%
  • Code gen −54%
  • Agentic −45%
4Gemini 3.6 Flash Google1476.5 +19.2$1.50
  • Balanced −56%
  • Summarise −48%
  • Chat −60%
  • Code gen −61%
  • Agentic −58%

Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 5

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

ModelIntelligence$/MHolds underWhat you give up
Qwen3.8 Max Qwen1481.9 +24.6$3.00
  • Balanced −13%
  • Chat −30%
  • Code gen −34%
  • Agentic −18%
  • 1.0M → 1.0M context
  • no file, audio input
GLM 5.3 Z.ai1476.9 +19.6$2.15
  • Balanced −37%
  • Summarise −10%
  • Chat −49%
  • Code gen −52%
  • Agentic −38%
  • no image, file, audio, video input
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi1465 tie$0.544
  • Balanced −84%
  • Summarise −76%
  • Chat −89%
  • Code gen −90%
  • Agentic −87%
  • no image, file, audio, video input
GLM 5.2 Z.ai1465.4 tie$1.83
  • Balanced −47%
  • Summarise −24%
  • Chat −57%
  • Code gen −59%
  • Agentic −47%
  • no image, file, audio, video input
GLM 5.1 Z.ai1464.1 tie$1.94
  • Balanced −44%
  • Summarise −19%
  • Chat −54%
  • Code gen −56%
  • Agentic −44%
  • 1.0M → 205K context
  • no image, file, audio, video input

What this compares, and what it leaves out

  • Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked tie rather than an improvement — see significance bands.
  • 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
  • Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
  • Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
  • The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the value frontier, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.