Gemma 3 vs o1
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. o1 requires paid API access.
- •o1 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than Gemma 3's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •Gemma 3 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. o1 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | 128K | ✓200K |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2024-09 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~76% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 78.3% |
| HumanEval | - | 92.4% |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 48.9% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Gemma 3
- ✓Runs on consumer hardware (4B and 12B variants)
- ✓Multimodal input support
- ✓Strong benchmark performance relative to size
- ✓Tight Keras and JAX integration
- ✓Good instruction following out of the box
o1
- ✓Best-in-class math and physics
- ✓Strong competitive coding (Codeforces, HumanEval)
- ✓Scientific reasoning (GPQA top performer)
- ✓Multi-step logic and planning
- ✓200K context for long technical documents
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemma 3 if you need...
- →On-device and edge inference
- →Low-resource environments
- →Prototyping with free Google AI Studio access
- →Researchers benchmarking small models
Choose o1 if you need...
- →Math and science problems
- →Competitive programming
- →Complex multi-step reasoning
- →Research assistance