Claude 4 Sonnet vs Gemma 4 31B

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Claude 4 Sonnet· Gemma 4 31B

Quick Verdict

Pick Gemma 4 31B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Gemma 4 31B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 73 to 62. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Gemma 4 31B's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 80 against 49.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 36% to 80%. Claude 4 Sonnet does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Gemma 4 31B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4 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 31B gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude 4 Sonnet.

Operational tradeoffs

PricePricing unavailableFree*
Speed40 t/sN/A
TTFT1.33sN/A
Context200K256K

Decision framing

BenchLM keeps the benchmark table and the operator tradeoffs on the same page so a better score does not hide a materially slower, pricier, or smaller-context model.

Runtime metrics show N/A when BenchLM does not have a sourced snapshot for that exact model. The scoring rules and freshness policy are documented on the methodology page.

BenchmarkClaude 4 SonnetGemma 4 31B
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.056%
BrowseComp62%
OSWorld-Verified57%
CodingGemma 4 31B wins
HumanEval65%
SWE-bench Verified72.7%
LiveCodeBench36%80%
SWE-bench Pro48%
Multimodal & GroundedClaude 4 Sonnet wins
MMMU-Pro81%76.9%
OfficeQA Pro78%
ReasoningClaude 4 Sonnet wins
MuSR69%
BBH82%74.4%
LongBench v271%
MRCRv272%66.4%
KnowledgeGemma 4 31B wins
MMLU86.5%
GPQA73%84.3%
SuperGPQA71%
MMLU-Pro75%85.2%
HLE12%26.5%
FrontierScience67%
SimpleQA71%
HLE w/o tools19.5%
Instruction Following
IFEval83%
Multilingual
MGSM84%
MMLU-ProX81%
Mathematics
AIME 202373%
AIME 202475%
AIME 202574%
HMMT Feb 202369%
HMMT Feb 202471%
HMMT Feb 202570%
BRUMO 202572%
MATH-50081%
Frequently Asked Questions (5)

Which is better, Claude 4 Sonnet or Gemma 4 31B?

Gemma 4 31B is ahead overall, 73 to 62. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 36% and 80%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Gemma 4 31B?

Gemma 4 31B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.3 versus 57.8. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4 Sonnet or Gemma 4 31B?

Gemma 4 31B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 80 versus 49.1. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude 4 Sonnet or Gemma 4 31B?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 70.8 versus 66.4. Inside this category, BBH is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Gemma 4 31B?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 76.9. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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