Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) | Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 48.4 | 68.3 |
| Input Price | Free | $0.33/M |
| Output Price | Free | $1.95/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 32,768 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 42.4 | 65.3 |
| ai_index_agentic | 18.1 | 45.5 |
| ai_index_coding | 64.9 | 90.0 |
| eqbench | 56.3 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) costs $0 and Qwen3.6 Plus costs $0.81, so Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) is free for the same work.
Qwen3.6 Plus 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).
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.6 Plus leads 68.3 to 48.4.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 Plus on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) if you need lower cost; pick Qwen3.6 Plus 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) | Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 153 | 163 |
| Code Review | 150 | 158 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 148 | 157 |
| Bug Fixing | 156 | 168 |
| Unit Test Generation | 140 | 148 |
| Code Documentation | 136 | 140 |
| Regex Writing | 130 | 132 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 133 | 139 |
| Frontend Component Design | 136 | 141 |
| Data Analysis | 148 | 159 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 143 | 151 |
| ETL Scripting | 141 | 148 |
| JSON Extraction | 142 | 146 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 133 | 134 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 138 | 144 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 138 | 144 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 147 | 154 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 129 | 130 |
| Blog Post Writing | 132 | 135 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →