Gemma 4 26B A4B vs o4 Mini

Across our 12 internal tests the models score identically on every shared metric (tool calling 5, structured output 5, long context 5, strategic analysis 5, faithfulness 5, persona consistency 5, multilingual 5, creative problem solving 4, agentic planning 4, classification 4, constrained rewriting 3, safety calibration 1) — winLossTie shows these as ties. Key ranked context: both score 5 on structured output (tied for 1st with 24 others), tool calling (tied for 1st with 16 others), long context (tied for 1st with 36 others), and faithfulness (tied for 1st with 32 others) — meaning in practice both are top options for schema adherence, function selection, and retrieval across 30K+ contexts. Constrained_rewriting (3, rank 31 of 53) and safety calibration (1, rank 32 of 55) are clear shared weaknesses — expect both to struggle with aggressive compression constraints and to be conservative on risky prompts. The differentiator is external benchmarks: o4 Mini posts 97.8% on MATH Level 5 (Epoch AI) and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI) — on Epoch AI’s MATH Level 5 it ranks 2nd of 14 models (tied). That external math signal suggests o4 Mini may produce stronger results on competition‑style math problems; our internal suite, however, shows parity on broader reasoning, tool use, long context, and multilingual tasks.

Raw rates from the payload: Gemma 4 26B A4B charges $0.08 per mTok input and $0.35 per mTok output; o4 Mini charges $1.10 per mTok input and $4.40 per mTok output. For 1M tokens (1,000 mTok): Gemma = $80 (1M input) or $350 (1M output) — a 50/50 mix costs $215; o4 Mini = $1,100 (1M input) or $4,400 (1M output) — a 50/50 mix costs $2,750. For 10M tokens multiply by 10 (Gemma 50/50 = $2,150; o4 Mini 50/50 = $27,500). For 100M tokens multiply by 100 (Gemma 50/50 = $21,500; o4 Mini 50/50 = $275,000). At scale (≥10M tokens/mo) the dollar gap becomes material for any product with continuous inference: Gemma reduces bill by roughly an order of magnitude in these scenarios. Teams with strict budget constraints or heavy multimodal/long‑context workloads should prioritize Gemma; teams where marginal gains on external math benchmarks justify much higher spend may prefer o4 Mini.

Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B if: you need a much larger context window (262,144 tokens), multimodal video→text support, or you run high-volume production inference and want to minimize costs — at 1M 50/50 tokens Gemma costs ~$215 vs o4 Mini ~$2,750. Choose o4 Mini if: third‑party math performance matters (97.8% MATH Level 5, 81.7% AIME 2025 per Epoch AI) and you are willing to pay substantially higher per-token rates for that advantage. For schema compliance, tool calling, long-context retrieval, creative problem solving, and faithfulness both models perform equivalently in our tests.