---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Pro · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/google__gemini-2.5-pro/
description: "9 models score at least as high as Gemini 2.5 Pro and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 5 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Pro · Undominated.ai

> 9 models score at least as high as Gemini 2.5 Pro and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 5 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# 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

| Workload | Gemini 2.5 Pro $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $3.44 | 4 | 5 |
| Summarise | $1.37 | 3 | 4 |
| Chat | $4.41 | 4 | 5 |
| Code gen | $6.41 | 4 | 5 |
| Agentic | $1.89 | 4 | 5 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). 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

| Intelligence | 1457.3 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 1.0M |
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | text, image, file, audio, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Gemini 2.5 Pro](/models/google__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.

| # | Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +32.9 | $0.750 | Balanced −78% Summarise −74% Chat −80% Code gen −81% Agentic −79% |
| 2 | Gemini 3.5 Flash Google | 1482.6 +25.3 | $3.38 | Balanced −2% Chat −7% Code gen −8% Agentic −4% |
| 3 | Muse Spark 1.1 Meta | 1478.3 +21 | $2.00 | Balanced −42% Summarise −21% Chat −52% Code gen −54% Agentic −45% |
| 4 | Gemini 3.6 Flash Google | 1476.5 +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.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Qwen3.8 Max Qwen | 1481.9 +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.ai | 1476.9 +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 Xiaomi | 1465 tie | $0.544 | Balanced −84% Summarise −76% Chat −89% Code gen −90% Agentic −87% | no image, file, audio, video input |
| GLM 5.2 Z.ai | 1465.4 tie | $1.83 | Balanced −47% Summarise −24% Chat −57% Code gen −59% Agentic −47% | no image, file, audio, video input |
| GLM 5.1 Z.ai | 1464.1 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](/significance/).
 - 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](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).