Gemma 3 vs GPT-5.5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 58 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.5 is meaningfully stronger at coding (93 vs 62).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.5 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) context window vs 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | GPT-5.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) | 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $5.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $30.00 |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2026-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | GPT-5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| MATH (27B) | 89% | - |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | 64.9% | - |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 82.6% |
| SWE-bench Pro | - | 58.6% |
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-5.5 if...
- →Complex professional coding, data analysis, and multi-tool agentic workflows
- →Long-document or large-codebase tasks needing a 1M+ context window
- →You want OpenAI's recommended default frontier model for new projects