Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Gemma 4 26B A4B

Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 3.5 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Gemma 4 26B A4B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 55 to 40. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Gemma 4 26B A4B. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Gemma 4 26B A4B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 3.5 Sonnet is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Gemma 4 26B A4B gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude 3.5 Sonnet.