What the paid plan is a subscription toEditorial callNeither shape is better and the difference is worth knowing before the prices are compared. Anthropic sells Claude on its own. Google sells Plus, Pro and Ultra under the name Google AI, and Gemini is what you reach through them. That is the vendor's own naming on its own page, not our shorthand.
One assistant
A Google AI plan that carries Gemini
Paying by the yearEditorial callA call about what each page publishes, not about what each vendor offers. Anthropic prints an annual rate beside the monthly one. Google's plans page prints monthly figures and never mentions a yearly option, and a page's silence is not the same as a no.
An annual rate printed on the cardOur pick on this row
The page does not raise it
Rows marked Editorial call are our judgment, not a published fact. Every other row carries two sourced values, listed in full below.
Choose Claude if
You want to buy one assistant and nothing else, and you want the option of committing for a year. Anthropic prices Claude on its own and prints a lower rate beside the monthly one for paying twelve months up front.
Choose Gemini if
You want the lower monthly figure, and you are comfortable that what you are buying is a Google AI plan rather than a Gemini plan. If your work already sits inside a Google account, that framing is a convenience rather than a caveat.
Both are general assistants sold as a monthly subscription, and both publish a free plan. The gap between the two entry prices is wide enough to look decisive and the two figures are not counting the same thing, which is what this page is for.
The two rows carrying a source are published figures, each naming the document it came from and the day it was opened, so you can check all four in about a minute. The rows marked Editorial call are our judgment, and each states what the judgment is a read of. We have not put the same work through both and scored the answers, so nothing here compares output.
Google's figure is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin, and it buys a plan called Google AI Plus. Anthropic's buys Claude. If you only ever open one assistant, that difference is mostly a naming question. If you are pricing a stack, it is not, because one of the two figures is already a bundle.
The second difference is what happens when you commit. Anthropic's Pro card leads with a lower rate for paying twelve months up front and prints the monthly figure in the same sentence. The number in the table is the monthly one, which is the convention across this site, because it is what you pay if you want to leave after a month. Google's page carries no annual figure to compare it against.
Neither page states a usage allowance for its free plan, and neither states a context window or a message cap anywhere we read. So the free tiers sit in the table as two prices rather than as two quantities, and which one goes further is a question the published pages do not answer. That absence is the reason our ranking of all three assistants is ordered on entry price rather than on what you get for nothing.
Both profiles carry the same figures with the same dates: Claude and Gemini. ChatGPT is the third assistant in this category, and it is absent from this page only because a head to head is two.
Where these numbers came from
Every figure above is the vendor's own published number. Each row names the document it was read from and the day a human opened it.
Source ledger: every claim on this page with its document and the date it was checked