DeepSeek V4 vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 is meaningfully stronger at math (93 vs 65 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (78 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 has a 1M tokens context window vs 256K tokens - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 | 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 | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.6% | - |
| Math / STEM / Coding (open-model comparison) | Best among open models (per DeepSeek) | - |
| 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 if...
- →You need a frontier-class open model you can self-host for data control
- →Your workload involves very long documents, codebases, or agent trajectories (up to 1M tokens)
- →You want top-tier agentic coding at a fraction of closed-model cost
- →You need to fine-tune or customize a strong base model
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