// alternatives · November 2026
Gemma 3 12B alternatives
Cheaper models that come close, budget substitutes, and the cheapest step up — chosen on published LiveBench scores and live list price, never on our opinion. Every model here supports tool calling and image input, as Gemma 3 12B does.
There are no clear published alternatives to Gemma 3 12B right now.
Gemma 3 12B: no published LiveBench run, $0.075 per 1M blended tokens, about $49.00/mo for a RAG assistant.
No priced, benchmarked model meets these criteria right now. See Gemma 3 12B's model page for its specs and nearest comparisons.
How alternatives are chosen
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-10-25. Only models with a published run are suggested on quality; a missing model means “not evaluated”, not “worse”.
- Prices — live list prices from OpenRouter, blended 3:1 input:output. Monthly figures price a RAG assistant with the published cached-input rate where there is one.
- Same job — suggestions must support every capability Gemma 3 12B has among tool calling and image input. Other listings of the same model (free or batch tiers) are variants, not alternatives, and are left out.
A few points on a public benchmark can hide large differences on your own tasks. Shortlist here, then decide with an eval — how to build one.