Gemma 4 26B A4B vs Grok 4.1 Fast

Across our 12-test suite the pair ties on 10 benchmarks, with Gemma taking tool calling (5 vs Grok's 4) and Grok taking constrained rewriting (4 vs Gemma's 3). Details:

• Tool calling (function selection, argument accuracy): Gemma 5, Grok 4. Gemma is tied for 1st (tied with 16 others) — this matters for orchestrating tools and multi-step APIs. Grok ranks 18 of 54 here (tied with 28).
• Constrained rewriting (compression within hard character limits): Grok 4, Gemma 3. Grok ranks 6 of 53 (tied with 24), while Gemma ranks 31 of 53 — pick Grok when tight-length fidelity matters.
• Structured_output (JSON/schema adherence): tie at 5; both are tied for 1st with 24 others — both enforce formats well.
• Strategic_analysis and creative problem solving: ties (both score 5 and 4 respectively), each tied among top models — both give nuanced tradeoff reasoning and feasible ideas in our tests.
• Faithfulness and classification: ties at 5 and 4; both are tied for 1st in faithfulness (with 32 others) and classification (with 29 others), indicating low hallucination and accurate routing in our testing.
• Long_context and persona consistency: ties at 5; both tied for 1st on long context and persona consistency, but note Grok's context_window is 2,000,000 tokens vs Gemma's 262,144 — in practice Grok supports much longer raw context despite the equal long context score.
• Safety_calibration: both score 1 and rank 32 of 55 (tied with 23 others) — both are conservative on harmful requests in our tests. Summary: Gemma's definitive advantage is tool calling and lower price per token; Grok's advantage is constrained rewriting and an extremely large 2,000,000-token window, useful when you must feed enormous documents.

Listed rates are per 1,000 tokens in the payload. Gemma 4 26B A4B: input $0.08/mTok, output $0.35/mTok. Grok 4.1 Fast: input $0.20/mTok, output $0.50/mTok. For straightforward comparison (assume a 50/50 split of input vs output tokens):

• 1M total tokens (500k input + 500k output): Gemma ≈ $215, Grok ≈ $350.
• 10M total tokens: Gemma ≈ $2,150, Grok ≈ $3,500.
• 100M total tokens: Gemma ≈ $21,500, Grok ≈ $35,000. Who should care: high-volume deployments (10M+ tokens/month), where Gemma saves roughly 35-40% versus Grok on token spend under this split. Small-scale interactive users (<1M tokens/month) will see smaller absolute savings but still lower per-token rates with Gemma.

Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B if: you need best-in-class tool calling in our tests (score 5 vs 4), want lower per-token costs (input $0.08/output $0.35 per mTok), or require video->text modality support. Choose Grok 4.1 Fast if: you need superior constrained rewriting (score 4 vs 3), an enormous 2,000,000-token context window for huge-document workflows, or agentic workflows that rely on that long raw context despite higher costs (input $0.20/output $0.50 per mTok).