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Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemma 3 12B

Compare Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemma 3 12B side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Open Prompt, Image Captioning, and OCR.

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GoogleGemini 3.6 Flash
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Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemma 3 12B Comparison Table

Evals updated September 3, 2026Pricing updated September 3, 2026

PropertyGemini 3.6 FlashGemma 3 12B
OrganizationGoogleGoogle
Categoryclosedopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateJul 2026Mar 2025
Context Window1.0M128K
Parameters12B
LicenseProprietaryCustom
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.750$0.050
Output $/1M$3.75$0.150
Vision Tasks
CaptioningDemoDemo
Chart Question Answering
ClassificationDemo
Document Question Answering
Image Tagging
Multi-Label Classification
OCRDemoDemo
Vision Language
Visual Question AnsweringDemoDemo
Object DetectionDemo
Video Classification
Model Features
Foundation Vision
LLMs with Vision Capabilities
Multimodal Vision
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 6 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
83.0%
Not evaluated
Avg cost / sample$0.0032
Avg speed / sample14.66s
By task
Object Detection (low)
57.1%
±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 55.9 to 59.4
$0.0041
Object Detection (high)
70.7%
±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 70.3 to 71.2
$0.0093
Counting (low)
80.2%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4
$0.0034
Counting (high)
79.3%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 77.0 to 82.4
$0.0089
Identification (low)
99.0%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 100.0
$0.0015
Identification (high)
100.0%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 100.0 to 100.0
$0.0033
OCR (low)
88.2%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.9 to 88.4
$0.0028
OCR (high)
89.5%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 89.5 to 89.6
$0.017
Data Extraction (low)
95.9%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 94.8 to 96.9
$0.0015
Data Extraction (high)
94.8%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 95.9
$0.0032
Reasoning (low)
77.7%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.2 to 80.1
$0.0031
Reasoning (high)
81.0%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.5 to 83.4
$0.0091

Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Gemma 3 12B: Overview

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, positioned as the workhorse tier in the Gemini 3.x family. It accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs with a 1 million token context window and produces up to 64,000 output tokens. The model builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash, incorporating developer and customer feedback to improve token efficiency, coding quality, and knowledge work performance. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, it consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and on some benchmarks such as DeepSWE, token reduction reaches up to 65%. It supports function calling, structured output, search as a tool, and code execution, and includes computer use as a built-in capability in the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise.

On coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE versus 37% for 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench versus 49.7%. Computer use performance on OSWorld-Verified improves from 78.4% to 83%, and knowledge work scores on GDPval-AA v2 rise from 1349 to 1421. The model carries a knowledge cutoff of March 2026 and ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards covering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cyber offense domains, with training to minimize refusals for beneficial uses. It is a proprietary, closed-weights model available in preview through the Gemini API via Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app.

Gemma 3 12B

Gemma 3 12B, announced by Google DeepMind on March 12, 2025, is part of the open-weight Gemma 3 family, designed to provide a balance between capability and accessibility. With around 12 billion parameters, it supports multimodal input (text + images) and outputs text, making it useful for reasoning, summarization, Q&A, and visual understanding tasks. The model supports an input context of 128,000 tokens and typically generates up to ~8,000 tokens in output.

The 12B variant is instruction-tuned (“Gemma-3-12B-IT”) and optimized for multilingual use across more than 140 languages. It can run on a single GPU or TPU, offering a lighter compute footprint than very large proprietary models, while still achieving strong performance in reasoning benchmarks. Quantized and lower-precision variants are available to improve efficiency. Limitations include smaller output lengths relative to input capacity, scaling hardware needs at larger sizes, and performance below massive proprietary models on the most complex multimodal or reasoning-heavy tasks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Gemma 3 12B has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals, so this comparison shows specs, licensing, and pricing rather than benchmark scores.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is released under Proprietary, while Gemma 3 12B uses Custom. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.

Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for open prompts and image captioning in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.