Gemma 4 12B vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (78 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at math (80 vs 65).
- •Gemma 4 12B has a 256K tokens context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemma 4 12B | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Alibaba (Qwen Team) | |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 12B | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | ~11.95B | - |
| Context window | 256K tokens | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
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 Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters