The short answer
Use Claude for code, long documents, and anything where you want the model to admit it does not know. Use GPT for image generation, voice, and broad creative work. Use Gemini for deep research, the largest context windows, and the lowest hallucination on summarization tasks. Use Llama when you want the model running on your hardware and not phoning home. Most serious users do not pick one. They route. We do.
Short profiles
Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.6)
Best for: long writing, code review, legal-adjacent drafting, agent work where calibration matters. Strengths: most willing of any frontier model to say "I do not know," strongest code performance, longest sustained reasoning. Weaknesses: slower than GPT or Gemini on simple queries, no image generation. Hallucination on Vectara around 4.4% to 4.9%.
OpenAI GPT (GPT-5, GPT-5.2, GPT-5.5)
Best for: image generation, voice, broad creative work, integration with Microsoft tools, sheer capability ceiling. Strengths: the largest model ecosystem, the best voice mode, the best image generation in a chat interface. Weaknesses: 86% hallucination on AA-Omniscience when GPT-5.5 does not know an answer; the most legally exposed of the four labs (OpenAI v Musk trial, NYT MDL).
Google Gemini (3, 3 Pro, 3.1)
Best for: deep research, multimodal (image + text + video understanding), the largest context window in production. Strengths: lowest summarization hallucination on Vectara, best Google Workspace integration, best video understanding. Weaknesses: consumer Gemini may train on your data unless you are on a Workspace or Vertex tier; some Google products have been sunset on short notice (Bard).
Meta Llama (4 Maverick, 5)
Best for: local, private, on-premise deployment. Strengths: weights are downloadable, runs on a Mac Studio or RTX 5090 box, no cloud dependency, no per-token cost after hardware. Weaknesses: capability is one tier behind frontier cloud models (not GPT-5 or Claude Opus quality on the hardest tasks), no built-in voice or image generation, requires an integrator to install correctly.
Hallucination ranking
From Vectara summarization leaderboard, lower is better:
- Gemini 2.0 Flash: 0.7%
- GPT-5: 1.4%
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 4.4%
- Llama 4 Maverick: 4.6%
- Claude Opus 4.6: about 4.9%
On the harder AA-Omniscience benchmark (open-knowledge questions), the ordering shifts: Claude calibrates better, GPT-5.5 has the highest false-confidence rate (86% when it does not know).
Cost comparison (May 2026 API pricing)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: $3 / million input tokens, $15 / million output tokens
- Claude Opus 4.6: $15 / million input, $75 / million output
- GPT-5: $1.25 / million input, $10 / million output
- GPT-5.5: $3 / million input, $15 / million output
- Gemini 3 Pro: $1.25 / million input, $10 / million output
- Llama 4 Maverick (local): zero per token after hardware amortization
For consumer chat interfaces, the math is different: Claude.ai Pro is $20/month, ChatGPT Plus is $20/month, Gemini Advanced is bundled with Google One AI Premium, and a properly built local Llama is roughly $25/month in electricity on a Mac Studio.
The router pattern with a concrete example
Here is how a real Restrepo workflow runs. Client says: "Find me three lighting designers in Bergen County who have done $1M+ residential projects, and draft outreach for each."
- Perplexity Sonar searches the web with citations, returns three candidates.
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 drafts three personalized outreach emails based on the candidate profiles.
- GPT-5 polishes for tone and brevity.
- Human review and signature.
Total elapsed: under two minutes. Cost in API tokens: about twenty cents. None of the four models could have done this alone as well as the four together did.
The local Llama option
For clients who want the router pattern without ever touching a cloud model, we run Llama 4 Maverick locally as the drafter, a smaller Llama or Mistral as the polisher, openWakeWord plus Whisper for voice input, and a controlled web-fetch tool for retrieval. Capability is roughly 80% of the cloud router for typical tasks. Privacy is 100%. See Build It Yourself.
Which one should you pick?
- For one consumer chat subscription: Claude.ai if you write a lot, ChatGPT Plus if you generate images and use voice, Gemini Advanced if you live in Google Workspace.
- For a small business operations stack: Perplexity Pro for research plus one Claude or OpenAI API account for drafting.
- For a luxury home with privacy concerns: local Llama plus optional cloud reach-out, configured by Restrepo.
- For a hospitality property running guest-facing AI: Enterprise contract with a single vendor (typically OpenAI or Anthropic), bounded scope, human-in-loop on every guest commitment.