head-to-head

Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite vs Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.

Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)
Vendorgooglegoogle
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score-53.7
Input Price$0.25/MFree
Output Price$1.50/MFree
Context Window1,048,576262,144
Max Output65,53632,768
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio✓-
Benchmark Scores
ai_index-48.4
ai_index_agentic-23.8
ai_index_coding-71.7
eqbench-57.5

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemma 4 31B (free) costs $0 and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite costs $0.62, so Gemma 4 31B (free) is free for the same work.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Gemma 4 31B (free).

Only Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite offers audio input.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemma 4 31B (free) on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite was released in May 2026 and Gemma 4 31B (free) in April 2026.

Pick Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite if you need long documents or audio input; pick Gemma 4 31B (free) if you need lower cost or the stronger all-round task scores.

Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.

Who wins by task?

TaskGoogle: Gemini 3.1 Flash LiteGoogle: Gemma 4 31B (free)
SQL Generation 133 156
Code Review 132 152
Code Completion 131 131
Code Refactoring 136 151
Bug Fixing 136 160
Unit Test Generation 124 143
Code Documentation 131 137
Regex Writing 119 131
CI/CD Pipelines 120 135
Frontend Component Design 122 138
Data Analysis 124 152
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 133 145
ETL Scripting 128 143
JSON Extraction 131 143
Bulk Data Labeling 129 133
OCR / Document Parsing 131 140
Table Extraction from PDFs 131 140
Long-Document Summarization 137 149
Short-Form Summarization 123 129
Blog Post Writing 121 133

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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