Amazon Nova Pro vs Gemma 3
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. Amazon Nova Pro requires paid API access.
- •Amazon Nova Pro has a 300K context window - 2x larger than Gemma 3's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •Gemma 3 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. Amazon Nova Pro is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| Amazon Nova Pro | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Amazon Web Services | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓300K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.80 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $3.20 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Amazon Nova Pro | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~85% | ~76% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Amazon Nova Pro
- ✓Native AWS Bedrock integration
- ✓Multimodal: text, image, video inputs
- ✓300K context at competitive pricing
- ✓Strong RAG performance via Bedrock Knowledge Bases
- ✓Guardrails support for enterprise governance
Gemma 3
- ✓Runs on consumer hardware (4B and 12B variants)
- ✓Multimodal input support
- ✓Strong benchmark performance relative to size
- ✓Tight Keras and JAX integration
- ✓Good instruction following out of the box
Which should you choose?
Choose Amazon Nova Pro if you need...
- →AWS-native production workloads
- →Enterprise deployments requiring governance
- →Video and multimodal analysis
- →RAG pipelines on Bedrock
Choose Gemma 3 if you need...
- →On-device and edge inference
- →Low-resource environments
- →Prototyping with free Google AI Studio access
- →Researchers benchmarking small models