Gemma 4 12B vs Mistral Large
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (92 vs 66 on our capability index).
- •Mistral Large is meaningfully stronger at reasoning (85 vs 70).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Mistral Large is paid API only.
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 128000 - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | Mistral Large | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 128000 |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | 2.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | 6.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2024-02 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| MMLU | - | 84.0% |
| HumanEval | - | 92.0% |
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 Mistral Large if...
- →You need a strong European-built flagship with open weights
- →Your work is multilingual or requires nuanced reasoning
- →You want structured/JSON output and solid coding ability
- →You need the option to self-host for data sovereignty