Gemma 4 12B vs Mistral OCR 4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at coding (68 vs 5 on our capability index).
- •Mistral OCR 4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (90 vs 78).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Mistral OCR 4 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | Mistral OCR 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | Not announced |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | 4000 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | 4000 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | Mistral OCR 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| OlmOCRBench | - | 85.20 |
| OmniDocBench | - | 93.07 |
| Human preference (head-to-head) | - | 72% win rate |
| Human evaluation (blind) | - | 72% |
| Human Evaluation (Blind Test) | - | 72% win rate |
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 OCR 4 if...
- →You need to convert PDFs, scans, or office docs into structured text/Markdown
- →You require high-accuracy multilingual document parsing at low cost
- →You need tables, equations, and layout preserved with confidence scores
- →You must keep documents in-house (self-hosted deployment)