DeepSeek V4 Flash vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is meaningfully stronger at math (86 vs 65 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (78 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash has a 1M tokens context window vs 256K tokens - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1M tokens | 256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-04 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V4 Flash | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning (vs V4 Pro) | Closely approaches V4 Pro | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
| Context window | - | 256K tokens |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if...
- →You want most of V4 Pro's capability at a lower price and higher throughput
- →You need long context but on a tighter compute or cost budget
- →You are serving high request volumes where per-token cost dominates
- →You want an open model small enough to self-host on modest multi-GPU setups
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