// head_to_head
Gemini 4 Hydrogen vs Kimi K3
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.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen leads by 12.0 points overall while listing 38% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
- Blended / 1M
- $3.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Nov 12, 2026
- Overall score
- 77.0
moonshotai
Kimi K3
- Blended / 1M
- $4.14
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Jul 16, 2026
- Overall score
- 65.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 77.0win | 65.0 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0192 | $0.0217 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $3.00win | $4.14 |
| Input price / 1M | $1.50 | $0.192win |
| Output price / 1M | $7.50win | $16.00 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.075win | $0.182 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 944K | 944K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 4 Hydrogen on top, Kimi K3 below, both out of 100.
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.
| Workload | Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $857.40/mo | $1,325/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,080/mo | $1,110/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,002/mo | $1,428/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $1,991/mo | $1,392/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $3,787/mo | $2,075/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 77.0.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
Leads on long-horizon agentic — 61.8 against 36.0.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen vs Kimi K3 FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 4 Hydrogen or Kimi K3?
Gemini 4 Hydrogen wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Gemini 4 Hydrogen leads by 12.0 points overall while listing 38% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.
Is Gemini 4 Hydrogen cheaper than Kimi K3?
Gemini 4 Hydrogen is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Gemini 4 Hydrogen lists at $3.00 per million tokens and Kimi K3 at $4.14 — Gemini 4 Hydrogen is 38% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Gemini 4 Hydrogen charges $1.50 in and $7.50 out, Kimi K3 charges $0.192 and $16.00 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen vs Kimi K3: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Gemini 4 Hydrogen scores 77.0 and Kimi K3 scores 65.0 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That is a 12.0-point lead for Gemini 4 Hydrogen. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Gemini 4 Hydrogen or Kimi K3?
They are close. Gemini 4 Hydrogen costs $0.0192 per point of overall capability and Kimi K3 costs $0.0217, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.
Does Gemini 4 Hydrogen or Kimi K3 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1.0M for Gemini 4 Hydrogen and 1.0M for Kimi K3.
Do Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Kimi K3 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.075 per million for Gemini 4 Hydrogen and $0.182 for Kimi K3, against full input rates of $1.50 and $0.192. 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.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-11-06, 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.