Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
68
Gemma 4 31B
74
Pick Gemma 4 31B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 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.
Knowledge
+22.1 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Gemma 4 31B
$3 / $15
$0 / $0
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Gemma 4 31B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 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 31B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 74 to 68. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
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 31B. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Gemma 4 31B 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 31B gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Gemma 4 31B is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 74 to 68. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 83.4% and 84.3%.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 61.3. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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