Gemma 3 vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is meaningfully stronger at speed (78 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at math (92 vs 62).
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) context window vs 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens (32K for the 1B variant) | 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| MATH (27B) | 89% | - |
| MMMU (27B, multimodal) | 64.9% | - |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 74.9% |
| AIME 2025 | - | 94.6% |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | - | 88.4% |
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 if...
- →You want strong reasoning at the lowest frontier-model price
- →Existing GPT-5-based systems that are already tuned and validated
- →General coding, math, and reasoning workloads on a budget