Model comparison
Gemma 2 vs Claude 3 Opus
- Input
- Free to download and self-host
- Output
- Free to download and self-host
- Context
- 8,192 tokens
- Released
- 2024-06-27
- Input
- $15.00
- Output
- $75.00
- Context
- 200K
- Released
- 2024-03-04
Claude 3 Opus scores higher on 4 of the 4 benchmarks both models report; Claude 3 Opus has the larger context window (200K vs 8K); Gemma 2 ships open weights while Claude 3 Opus is API-only.
Specs and pricing side by side
| Spec | Gemma 2 | Claude 3 Opus |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | |
| Released | 2024-06-27 | 2024-03-04 |
| Context window | 8,192 tokens | 200K |
| Max output | Not separately specified; output shares the… | 4K |
| Input price | Free to download and self-host | $15.00 |
| Output price | Free to download and self-host | $75.00 |
| Parameters | Three sizes: 2B (2.6B), 9B, and 27B parameters | Undisclosed |
| License | Gemma (Gemma Terms of Use) — a custom, commercially permissive license that allows redistribution, fine-tuning, commercial use, and derivative works subject to a prohibited-use policy. Not OSI-approved (not Apache 2.0). | Proprietary |
| Weights | Open weights | API only |
| Modalities | text | Text, Vision |
| Knowledge cutoff | Not officially published by Google for Gemma 2 | August 2023 |
Benchmarks both models report
| Benchmark | Gemma 2 | Claude 3 Opus |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 75.2% | 86.8% |
| GSM8K | 74% | 95% |
| HumanEval | 51.8% | 84.9% |
| MATH | 42.3% | 60.1% |
Scores are as published by each maker or its cited source; harness, reasoning effort and date can differ between rows, so treat small gaps as ties. Sources are listed on each model page.
Which one should you pick?
Pick Gemma 2 if…
- You want to self-host or fine-tune (open weights, Gemma (Gemma Terms of Use) — a custom, commercially permissive license that allows redistribution, fine-tuning, commercial use, and derivative works subject to a prohibited-use policy. Not OSI-approved (not Apache 2.0).).
- You need text input, which Claude 3 Opus lacks.
- Your use case is: on-device and self-hosted text generation, summarization, and extraction where data must stay local.
Pick Claude 3 Opus if…
- You care about MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval (it scores higher on 4 shared benchmarks).
- You need the longer context (200K vs 8K).
- You need Text / Vision input, which Gemma 2 lacks.
- Your use case is: complex reasoning, analysis and long-document understanding over the 200K window.
FAQ
Which is better, Gemma 2 or Claude 3 Opus?
Claude 3 Opus scores higher on 4 of the 4 benchmarks both models report; Claude 3 Opus has the larger context window (200K vs 8K); Gemma 2 ships open weights while Claude 3 Opus is API-only. The better pick depends on whether you value benchmark scores, price per token, context length or openness for your workload.
What are the context windows of Gemma 2 and Claude 3 Opus?
Gemma 2 offers 8,192 tokens with up to Not separately specified; output shares the 8,192-token context window output; Claude 3 Opus offers 200K with up to 4K output.
Is Gemma 2 newer than Claude 3 Opus?
Gemma 2 was released 2024-06-27; Claude 3 Opus was released 2024-03-04.