Command R+ 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. Command R+ requires paid API access.
- •Gemma 3 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. Command R+ is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| Command R+ | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Cohere | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.50 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-04 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Command R+ | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| RAG (BEIR) | Top-5 | - |
| MMLU | ~75% | ~76% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Command R+
- ✓Purpose-built for RAG with citation grounding
- ✓Low hallucination rate on retrieval tasks
- ✓Reliable multi-step tool calling
- ✓Supports 10 business languages natively
- ✓Available for on-premise deployment
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 Command R+ if you need...
- →Enterprise RAG applications
- →Knowledge base Q&A with citations
- →Multi-step agentic workflows
- →On-premise enterprise deployments
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