Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
48
Gemma 4 12B
53
Pick Gemma 4 12B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 1M context window.
Multimodal
+4.1 difference
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Gemma 4 12B
$0.25 / $1.5
N/A
205 t/s
N/A
7.50s
N/A
1M
256K
Pick Gemma 4 12B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 1M context window.
Gemma 4 12B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 53 to 48. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Gemma 4 12B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite 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. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 256K for Gemma 4 12B.
Gemma 4 12B is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 53 to 48.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.2 versus 69.1. Gemma 4 12B stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
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