Gemma 3 vs GPT-5.6
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 70 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.6 is meaningfully stronger at coding (94 vs 62).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.6 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | GPT-5.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) | Not announced |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | 5 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | 30 |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | GPT-5.6 |
|---|---|---|
| MATH (27B) | 89% | - |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | 64.9% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Sol) | - | 88.8% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Terra) | - | 82.5% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Luna) | - | 84.3% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | - | 88.8 |
| ExploitBench | - | Competitive with Anthropic Mythos Preview |
| ExploitGym | - | Significant improvements |
| GeneBench v1 | - | Not announced |
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-5.6 if...
- →You want to standardize on one model generation but route requests across cost/quality tiers
- →You are an approved preview partner exploring the newest OpenAI capabilities
- →Workloads spanning agentic coding, knowledge work, and research where tier flexibility helps