Gemma 3 vs GPT-4o
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at long context (75 vs 55 on our capability index).
- •GPT-4o is meaningfully stronger at coding (72 vs 62).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-4o is paid API only.
- •Gemma 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| MATH (27B) | 89% | - |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | 64.9% | - |
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| MATH | - | 76.6% |
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 GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses