Gemini 2.5 Pro vs Gemma 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 2.5 Pro is meaningfully stronger at reasoning (88 vs 64 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 70).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Gemini 2.5 Pro is paid API only.
- •Gemma 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65K output - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65K output | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.25 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-06 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Pro | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1M tokens | - |
| Pricing tier break | 200K tokens | - |
| MATH (27B) | - | 89% |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | - | 64.9% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 2.5 Pro if...
- →Complex reasoning, analysis, or STEM tasks that benefit from a thinking model
- →Processing very long inputs (long documents, large repos)
- →Multimodal tasks needing high quality
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