Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | anthropic | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 48.4 | 80.1 |
| Input Price | Free | $3.00/M |
| Output Price | Free | $15.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 32,768 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 42.4 | 77.9 |
| ai_index_agentic | 18.1 | 67.3 |
| ai_index_coding | 64.9 | 100.0 |
| aider_polyglot | - | 61.3 |
| eqbench | 56.3 | 68.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) costs $0 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $6.75, so Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) is free for the same work.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Gemma 4 26B A4B (free).
Only Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads 80.1 to 48.4.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) scores higher on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization), Claude Sonnet 4.6 on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) was released in April 2026 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in February 2026.
Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) if you need lower cost or video input; pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need long documents, benchmark performance 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?
| Task | Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 153 | 183 |
| Code Review | 150 | 183 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 148 | 179 |
| Bug Fixing | 156 | 196 |
| Unit Test Generation | 140 | 166 |
| Code Documentation | 136 | 148 |
| Regex Writing | 130 | 139 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 133 | 155 |
| Frontend Component Design | 136 | 154 |
| Data Analysis | 148 | 183 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 143 | 163 |
| ETL Scripting | 141 | 167 |
| JSON Extraction | 142 | 142 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 133 | 124 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 138 | 152 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 138 | 152 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 147 | 172 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 129 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 132 | 147 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →