Google: Gemma 3 12B (free)
Google Gemma 3 12B (free) is available at no cost with vision support, but benchmark scores are weak — particularly in reasoning and coding — making it suitable only for very lightweight tasks. The free tier is its main advantage for experimentation on a budget.
Assessment date: March 14, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
Gemma 3 introduces multimodality, supporting vision-language input and text outputs. It handles context windows up to 128k tokens, understands over 140 languages, and offers improved math, reasoning, and chat capabilities, including structured outputs and function calling. Gemma 3 12B is the second largest in the family of Gemma 3 models after Gemma 3 27B
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text + Image → Text |
| Tokenizer | Gemini |
| Instruct Type | gemma |
| Parameters | 12B |
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Evaluations
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
