Gemma 4 12B vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at speed (78 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at math (92 vs 65).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5 is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 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 | 2026-06 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| 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 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 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