Gemma 3 27B vs Mistral Small 3 24B

Gemma 3 27B

Google DeepMind

Gemma 3 27B is a 27-billion-parameter open-weight model from Google DeepMind, released in March 2025 alongside the Gemma 3 12B as the higher-capability variant in the series, built with native vision-language support for text and image inputs across a 128K token context window. Among the Gemma 3 releases, the 27B delivered the strongest results on instruction-following and knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks, making it the preferred option for developers needing greater accuracy from a self-hostable model. Its open-weight availability under a permissive license made it a common starting point for vision-language fine-tuning projects.

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.