Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Gemma 4 26B A4B
55
Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct
27
Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Knowledge
+8.3 difference
Gemma 4 26B A4B
Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct
$0 / $0
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
256K
128K
Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Gemma 4 26B A4B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 55 to 27. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Gemma 4 26B A4B's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 49.2 against 40.9.
Gemma 4 26B A4B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct 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 128K for Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct.
Gemma 4 26B A4B is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 55 to 27.
Gemma 4 26B A4B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 49.2 versus 40.9. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
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