Gemma 4 dropped two days ago and everyone is already comparing the 31B and the new 26B-A4B MoE version against Qwen 3.5 27B. If you’re trying to decide which one to run locally for your SaaS product or side project, here’s the practical breakdown.
All three are open-weight models you can actually self-host today. The real question isn’t “which one wins benchmarks” — it’s which one fits your hardware, your latency needs, and the kind of work you actually do.
Quick comparison (April 2026)
| Model | Type | Active parameters | Best at | Fits on single 4090? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 31B | Dense | ~31B | Strong reasoning & factual accuracy | No (needs ~58 GB) |
| Gemma 4 26B-A4B | MoE | ~4B active (out of 25B total) | Speed + efficiency | Yes (comfortably) |
| Qwen 3.5 27B | Dense | ~27B | Coding & creative tasks | Yes |
The 26B-A4B is the interesting one. It’s a Mixture-of-Experts model — only about 4 billion parameters are active at any time. That means it thinks like a much bigger model but runs with the memory and speed of something much smaller.
Real trade-offs you’ll feel
The 31B version gives you a bit more depth on complex reasoning and long chains of thought. That shows up when your app needs careful step-by-step logic or when hallucinations would be expensive.
The 26B-A4B is noticeably faster and cheaper to run. Many people on forums are saying it feels snappier in real use even though it has fewer active parameters. It’s the one most builders are reaching for when they want good quality without spinning up extra GPUs.
Qwen 3.5 27B still holds its own — especially on coding tasks and when you want more varied, human-sounding output. It’s been around a couple months longer, so the community has more experience with it.
When to pick which one
Go with Gemma 4 31B if your product needs the strongest possible reasoning and you have the hardware (or can afford multi-GPU). It’s the one that feels “smarter” on hard problems.
Go with Gemma 4 26B-A4B if you want a good balance and you’re running on a single high-end GPU. This is probably the sweet spot for most solo builders and small teams right now.
Go with Qwen 3.5 27B if your main workload is code generation or you want more creative/flexible output. It’s still excellent and very well understood by the community.
Things to watch
All three run fine on a single RTX 4090 if you quantize them properly. The 26B-A4B is the easiest on memory. The 31B needs more careful quantization or multi-GPU to feel usable.
Context windows are all in the 256K range, which is plenty for most real apps. None of them magically solve hallucinations — you’ll still want good prompting and maybe a quick verification step for anything important.
Licensing is friendly on all three (Apache 2.0 for Gemma 4), so commercial use is straightforward.
Next step
Download the 26B-A4B first — it’s the one most people are excited about right now. Spin it up in LM Studio or with vLLM, throw a few prompts from your actual product at it, and compare the speed and quality against whatever you’re using today. That 10-minute test will tell you more than any benchmark table.