Head-to-head comparison across 4benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Gemini 3.5 Flash
87
Gemma 4 12B
53
Verified leaderboard positions: Gemini 3.5 Flash #9 · Gemma 4 12B unranked
Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
Coding
+17.5 difference
Reasoning
+31.3 difference
Knowledge
+19.8 difference
Multimodal
+14.7 difference
Gemini 3.5 Flash
Gemma 4 12B
$1.5 / $9
N/A
284.2 t/s
N/A
18.55s
N/A
1M
256K
Pick Gemini 3.5 Flash if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 87 to 53. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Gemini 3.5 Flash's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 74.7 against 43.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MRCRv2, 77.3% to 43.4%. Gemma 4 12B does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Gemini 3.5 Flash gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 256K for Gemma 4 12B.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 87 to 53. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MRCRv2, where the scores are 77.3% and 43.4%.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.8 versus 58. Inside this category, GPQA-D is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 72 versus 54.5. Gemini 3.5 Flash stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
Gemini 3.5 Flash has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 74.7 versus 43.4. Inside this category, MRCRv2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemini 3.5 Flash has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.8 versus 69.1. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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