Gemma 3 vs Qwen 3
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Specs comparison
| Gemma 3 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-03 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 3 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~76% | ~87% |
| HumanEval | - | ~89% |
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
Qwen 3
- ✓Exceptional multilingual support (100+ languages)
- ✓Apache 2.0 license - fully open for commercial use
- ✓Multiple size variants from 0.6B to 235B MoE
- ✓Strong math and coding across models
- ✓Leading performance for Chinese language tasks
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 Qwen 3 if you need...
- →Multilingual applications
- →Self-hosted cost-sensitive deployments
- →Custom fine-tuning on domain-specific data
- →Asian market applications