// head_to_head

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B

Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.

OpenRouter + LiveBenchAll comparisonsFull leaderboard

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.

Gemma 4 26B A4B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.

deepseek

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

Blended / 1M
$0.190
Context
1.3M
Released
Jul 31, 2026
Overall score
74.2
reasoningtool callingprompt caching

google

Gemma 4 26B A4B

Blended / 1M
$0.143
Context
262K
Released
Apr 3, 2026
Overall score
Not evaluated
reasoningtool callingimage inputvideo inputprompt caching

Specs and pricing

MetricDeepSeek V4 Flash 0731Gemma 4 26B A4B
LiveBench overall

Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better.

74.2
Cost per point

Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability.

$0.0356
Blended price / 1M

3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic.

$0.190$0.143win
Input price / 1M$0.040win$0.090
Output price / 1M$0.640$0.300win
Cached input / 1M

Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one.

$0.016win$0.050
Context window1.3Mwin262K
Max output tokens944Kwin236K

Benchmarks by category

An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 on top, Gemma 4 26B A4B below, both out of 100.

Agentic coding
46.8
Coding
75.0
Reasoning
86.6
Mathematics
86.8
Data analysis
79.3
Language
79.2
Instruction following
65.5

What each one costs to run

Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.

WorkloadDeepSeek V4 Flash 0731Gemma 4 26B A4B
Support chatbot

1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests

$59.07/mo$42.72/mo
RAG assistant

8K in / 600 out × 100K requests

$60.80/mo$74.00/mo
Coding agent

40K in / 4K out × 20K requests

$69.76/mo$73.60/mo
Document extraction

20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests

$86.80/mo$110.50/mo
Bulk classification

500 in / 20 out × 5M requests

$152.00/mo$235.00/mo
Run these two through the cost calculator

Which should you pick?

You need to fit large documents in one call

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

Wider context window — 1.3M against 262K.

You are cost-constrained

Gemma 4 26B A4B

Cheaper on blended list price at $0.143 per million tokens.

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B FAQ

Which is better, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or Gemma 4 26B A4B ?

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Gemma 4 26B A4B does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.

Is DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 cheaper than Gemma 4 26B A4B ?

Gemma 4 26B A4B is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 lists at $0.190 per million tokens and Gemma 4 26B A4B at $0.143 — Gemma 4 26B A4B is 33% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 charges $0.040 in and $0.640 out, Gemma 4 26B A4B charges $0.090 and $0.300 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.

Does DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or Gemma 4 26B A4B have a bigger context window?

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 has the larger context window: 1.3M for DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 against 262K for Gemma 4 26B A4B . Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.

Do DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and Gemma 4 26B A4B support prompt caching?

Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.016 per million for DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and $0.050 for Gemma 4 26B A4B , against full input rates of $0.040 and $0.090. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.

Related comparisons

How these numbers are produced

  • Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
  • ScoresLiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
  • Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
  • “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.

Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.