# Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Gemma 3 12B

> Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the stronger model overall, scoring 34.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-5-sonnet-vs-gemma-3-12b
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 17

## Summary

- They share 17 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3.5 Sonnet scores higher in 6 categories and Gemma 3 12B in 3 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude 3.5 Sonnet leads 23.1 to 15.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is DTBench: 67.8% for Claude 3.5 Sonnet and 48.8% for Gemma 3 12B.
- Gemma 3 12B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Google |
| Noometry Index | 34.6 | 32.1 |
| Rank | 231 | 262 |
| Context | — | 131K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.15 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 39.0 (#165)
- Gemma 3 12B: 31.7 (#280)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1342 | 1281 |
| Aider Polyglot | 51.6% | — |
| SciCode | — | 17.4% |
| GSO | 4.6% | — |
| WeirdML | 40% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 46.8% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | 67.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 58.6% | — |
| CadEval | 48% | — |
| HumanEval+ | 81.7% | — |
| MBPP+ | 74.3% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 32.3 (#67)
- Gemma 3 12B: 25.5 (#108)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 30.4% |
| TheAgentCompany | 24% | — |
| Cybench | 17.5% | — |
| BALROG | 32.6% | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 45.2% | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 23.1 (#183)
- Gemma 3 12B: 15.7 (#313)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1305 | 1309 |
| DTBench | 67.8% | 48.8% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 133.55 | 123.5 |
| SimpleBench | 41.4% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| EnigmaEval | 0.9% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | 56.7% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | 55% | — |
| LMCA | — | 4.5% |
| ForecastBench | 60.7 | — |
| LiveBench | 59% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 19.2 (#288)
- Gemma 3 12B: 22.3 (#279)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 8.5% | 16.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1307 | 1307 |
| Omni-MATH | 27.6% | — |
| LiveBench Math | 52.3% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 56.9% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 2.1% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 28.6 (#245)
- Gemma 3 12B: 26.5 (#257)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 55.3% | 39.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1265 | 1248 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 4.1% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 77.7% | — |
| Confabulations | 19.9% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 4.4% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 56.5% | — |
| MMLU | 87.3% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 26.5 (#120)
- Gemma 3 12B: —

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1125 | — |
| Video-MME | 60% | — |
| GeoBench | 62% | — |
| VPCT | 33% | — |
| MindCube | — | 46.7% |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 43.2 (#185)
- Gemma 3 12B: 45.7 (#165)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1283 | 1318 |
| LMArena German | 1297 | 1370 |
| LMArena Russian | 1306 | 1335 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1272 | — |
| LMArena French | 1305 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1234 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1200 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1290 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 68.8 (#182)
- Gemma 3 12B: 68.6 (#186)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1297 | 1299 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | 69.3% | — |
| IFEval | 85.5% | — |

## Long Context

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 39.9 (#167)
- Gemma 3 12B: 40.0 (#162)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1311 | 1317 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 52.9 (#164)
- Gemma 3 12B: 47.5 (#209)

| Benchmark | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Gemma 3 12B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1298 | 1334 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1292 | 1331 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1451 | 1126 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1326 | 1334 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 80.3% | — |
| WildBench | 79.2% | — |
| LiveBench Language | 53.8% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3.5 Sonnet better than Gemma 3 12B?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the stronger model overall, scoring 34.6 to 32.1 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Gemma 3 12B better for coding?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.0 versus 31.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemma 3 12B share?

17 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3.5 Sonnet has 60 scored results on Noometry and Gemma 3 12B has 24.