Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is meaningfully stronger at speed (98 vs 78 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at long context (80 vs 70).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Haiku 4.5 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | - |
| GPQA | 64.6% | - |
| MMLU Pro | 80.0% | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
| Context window | - | 256K tokens |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if...
- →You need high throughput and low latency at minimal cost
- →You are fanning out many parallel sub-agents or worker calls
- →You want solid coding/computer-use quality without Opus/Sonnet pricing
- →Your task fits comfortably within a 200K context window
Choose Gemma 4 12B if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable multimodal model
- →Running on a single consumer GPU or a laptop
- →Data-privacy or on-prem requirements
- →You want a permissive license (Apache 2.0) for commercial use