Gemma 4 (Google) vs Qwen (Alibaba)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
Gemma 4 (Google)
Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights family -- Qwen3.5, Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-VL, Qwen3-Max. Apache 2.0 flagship sizes.
| Category | Gemma 4 (Google) | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 7.0 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| Value | 10.0 | 10.0 |
| Features | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| Overall | 8.3 | 8.8 |
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | Gemma 4 (Google) | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen3.5-397B MoE
| Benchmark | Gemma 4 (Google) | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 84.3% | 78.2% |
| HumanEval | 85% | 92.5% |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick Gemma 4 (Google) if...
- ✓Stronger on graduate-level science questions (+6.1% on GPQA Diamond)
Developers and businesses who need a permissively licensed multimodal LLM they can self-host or fine-tune. Especially good for multilingual use cases and on-device deployment.
Visit Gemma 4 (Google)Pick Qwen (Alibaba) if...
- ✓Higher output quality (9 vs 8)
- ✓More features (9 vs 8)
- ✓Stronger on python code generation (+7.5% on HumanEval)
Developers who want frontier-tier open weights with Apache 2.0 licensing. Qwen3-Coder-Next is arguably the best local coding model; Qwen3.5-397B is a top-3 open generalist.
Visit Qwen (Alibaba)Our Verdict
Qwen (Alibaba) edges out Gemma 4 (Google) with a 8.8 vs 8.3 overall score. Both are solid picks, but Qwen (Alibaba) has the advantage in output quality.