Compare / Gemma 4 26B-A4B vs Magistral Small 1.2

Gemma 4 26B-A4B vs Magistral Small 1.2

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Gemma 4 26B-A4B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 67.5 vs 55.9. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Gemma 4 26B-A4B wins 3 and Magistral Small 1.2 wins 0. Both need about 16.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Gemma 4 26B-A4B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.068 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Gemma 4 26B-A4B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you need math and reasoning
you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you work with long documents
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Pick Magistral Small 1.2 if…

No clear advantage in the data we have.

Specifications

	Gemma 4 26B-A4B	Magistral Small 1.2
Small LM Index	67.5 (likely 66–69)	55.9 (likely 51–60)
Lab	Google · United States	Mistral AI · Europe
Released	2026-04-02	2025-09-17
Parameters	25.2B (3.8B active, MoE)	24B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~16.8 GB	~16.9 GB
Context window	256K tokens	128K tokens
Input	text, image	text, image
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	Always thinks
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.068 ($0.040 in, $0.15 out)	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	5.9M	29.7K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Gemma 4 26B-A4B	Magistral Small 1.2
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	82.6	≈ 76
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	82.3	70.1
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	8.7	≈ 9
AIME Math	88.3	77.3
LiveCodeBench Coding	77.1	70.9
SWE-bench Verified Coding	17.4^*	≈ 39
Terminal-Bench Agentic	34.2^*	—
τ²-Bench Agentic	68.2	—
MMMU-Pro Vision	73.8	—

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Gemma 4 26B-A4B or Magistral Small 1.2?

Gemma 4 26B-A4B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 67.5 vs 55.9. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Gemma 4 26B-A4B wins 3 and Magistral Small 1.2 wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Gemma 4 26B-A4B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.068 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 16.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Gemma 4 26B-A4B has the longer context window: 256K tokens against 128K.

Can I use Gemma 4 26B-A4B and Magistral Small 1.2 commercially?

Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.