Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B

Pick Claude Sonnet 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 26B A4B only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 68 to 64. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude Sonnet 4.5's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 95 against 73.8. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MRCRv2, 81% to 44.1%. Gemma 4 26B A4B does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 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 Sonnet 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 Sonnet 4.5.