Gemini 2.5 Flash vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks, including Context window (256K tokens vs 1M tokens).
- •Gemini 2.5 Flash is meaningfully stronger at speed (90 vs 78 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Gemini 2.5 Flash is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output | ✓256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.30 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $2.50 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-06 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1M tokens | ✓256K tokens |
| Input price | $0.30/1M | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 2.5 Flash if...
- →High-volume, latency-sensitive production workloads
- →Chatbots, extraction, classification, and summarization at scale
- →You need decent reasoning but must control costs
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