Gemini 3.5 vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 3.5 is meaningfully stronger at coding (90 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Gemini 3.5 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemini 3.5 | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) | ✓256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.50 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $9.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemini 3.5 | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (coding) | 76.2% | - |
| MCP Atlas (tool use) | 83.6% | - |
| CharXiv Reasoning (multimodal) | 84.2% | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
| Context window | - | 256K tokens |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 3.5 if...
- →You need frontier agent/coding performance without frontier prices
- →Building autonomous agents that make many tool calls
- →High-throughput production workloads that were previously too costly on a Pro model
- →You want a strong default multimodal model with a 1M-token context window
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