Gemma 4 12B vs GPT-5.5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (92 vs 58 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.5 is meaningfully stronger at math (91 vs 65).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.5 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | GPT-5.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 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 | 2026-06 | 2026-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | GPT-5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| 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 4 12B if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable multimodal model
- →Running on a single consumer GPU or a laptop
- →Data-privacy or on-prem requirements
- →You want a permissive license (Apache 2.0) for commercial use
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