Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B

Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Haiku 4.5 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 26B A4B finishes one point ahead overall, 64 to 63. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.

Gemma 4 26B A4B's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 77.1 against 48.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 36% to 77.1%. Claude Haiku 4.5 does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude Haiku 4.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.80 input / $4.00 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 Haiku 4.5 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 Haiku 4.5.