Claude Haiku 4.5 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. Claude Haiku 4.5 requires paid API access.
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 has a 200K 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. Claude Haiku 4.5 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.80 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $4.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~82% | ~76% |
| HumanEval | ~88% | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Haiku 4.5
- ✓Lowest latency in the Claude lineup
- ✓Extremely cost-effective at scale
- ✓Strong at classification and extraction
- ✓Good at following structured output schemas
- ✓Handles 200K context at low cost
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 Claude Haiku 4.5 if you need...
- →High-volume API pipelines
- →Real-time classification
- →Form and document extraction
- →Low-latency chatbots
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