Command R+ vs Gemma 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (70 vs 5).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Command R+ is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Command R+ | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Cohere | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.50 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-08 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Command R+ | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| RAG (BEIR) | Top-5 | - |
| MMLU | ~75% | - |
| MATH (27B) | - | 89% |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | - | 64.9% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Command R+ if...
- →Your core use case is grounded RAG with citations
- →You need reliable multi-step tool/agent orchestration
- →You want an enterprise model available on Bedrock
- →You need multilingual responses across the 10 optimized languages
Choose Gemma 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a size to match your hardware
- →Multilingual or multimodal tasks on-prem
- →Privacy-sensitive or offline deployments
- →Fine-tuning on your own data