I checked price per AA task and yeah Argon vs Opus 5.5 High are practically neck and neck both on "intelligence" and cost per task. So if you aren't pushing higher on Opus (which I think can quickly become very expensive and I always treat Max and those like "benchmark settings"), I think this becomes more of a matter of which platform you like more or prefer for various reasons.
Honestly, I think this will be a trend in 2027 when all those models become "good enough" for elite coding and whatever. I predict they'll have to branch out more and build their platform to differentiate themselves from each other, maybe even in terms of branding and trust, marketing towards various demographies, youth vs elderly, students vs employees, etc.
While that’s true, I have found Gemini models to be exclusively good for data extraction, and absolutely terrible at everything else.
I pay for lots of models because they’re good at different things: $20 a month each for Grok and GLM have easily paid for themselves by finding bugs that my main work models didn’t, but I’m yet to have any Gemini model find a real bug, and Gemini’s results for general work will sometimes border malicious compliance, when it’s not having a hissy fit about some imagined issue.
If it's smart enough to do the job then it won't matter that Opus is smarter. At the right price and performance, at least.