Gemma 4 26B A4B vs GPT-5

Score-by-score (our 1–5 tests):

• Agentic planning: Gemma 4 vs GPT-5 5 — GPT-5 wins and is tied for 1st vs Gemma’s rank 16 of 54 in our tests; choose GPT-5 for goal decomposition and failure recovery.
• Structured output: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both are tied for 1st (Gemma and GPT-5 each tied with 24 other models) so both excel at JSON/schema compliance.
• Faithfulness: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st, meaning low hallucination risk in our prompts.
• Classification: Gemma 4 vs GPT-5 4 — tie; both tied for 1st among 53 models.
• Long context: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st, so retrieval across 30K+ tokens is strong on both.
• Multilingual: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st, so non-English outputs are comparable.
• Persona consistency: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st.
• Constrained rewriting: Gemma 3 vs GPT-5 4 — GPT-5 wins (GPT-5 rank 6 vs Gemma rank 31), so GPT-5 better compresses or enforces strict length constraints.
• Creative problem solving: Gemma 4 vs GPT-5 4 — tie (both rank ~9th in our suite), so idea-generation quality is similar.
• Strategic analysis: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st on nuanced tradeoff reasoning.
• Tool calling: Gemma 5 vs GPT-5 5 — tie; both tied for 1st (function selection and sequencing are on par).
• Safety calibration: Gemma 1 vs GPT-5 2 — GPT-5 wins; GPT-5 ranks 12 of 55 vs Gemma 32 of 55, so GPT-5 is measurably better at refusing harmful requests while allowing legitimate ones in our tests. External benchmarks (Epoch AI): GPT-5 scores 73.6% on SWE-bench Verified, 98.1% on MATH Level 5, and 91.4% on AIME 2025 — these external measures corroborate GPT-5’s strength on coding/math tasks. Gemma has no external scores in the payload. Overall, GPT-5 wins the decisive categories (agentic planning, constrained rewriting, safety) while the two models tie on many core capabilities (structured output, long context, multilingual, tool calling).

Raw price per mTok (input/output): Gemma 4 26B A4B = $0.08 / $0.35; GPT-5 = $1.25 / $10.00. To illustrate (assuming a 50/50 split of input/output tokens):

• 1M total tokens (500k in / 500k out): Gemma ≈ $215; GPT-5 ≈ $5,625.
• 10M tokens: Gemma ≈ $2,150; GPT-5 ≈ $56,250.
• 100M tokens: Gemma ≈ $21,500; GPT-5 ≈ $562,500. At scale (10M+ tokens/month) the difference becomes decisive: Gemma reduces inference spend by ~26x under the 50/50 assumption (priceRatio payload = 0.035). Teams running high-volume chat, content generation, or multimodal ingestion should care most; teams with low-volume, high-stakes workflows may prefer GPT-5 despite the cost gap.

Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B if: you need a high-performing, multimodal model with a huge context window (262,144 tokens) and your primary constraint is cost — input/output pricing is $0.08 / $0.35 per mTok. Good for high-volume chat, bulk multimodal ingestion, and applications where every dollar matters. Choose GPT-5 if: you need the best behavior in agentic planning, safety calibration, constrained rewriting, or top-tier math/coding performance (See Epoch AI: MATH Level 5 98.1%, SWE-bench Verified 73.6%). Accept the higher cost ($1.25 / $10.00 per mTok) for higher assurance on safety-sensitive, reasoning-heavy, or single-user high-quality experiences.