Gemma 3 vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) | ✓256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| MATH (27B) | 89% | - |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | 64.9% | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
| Context window | - | 256K tokens |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
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
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