Gemma 3 27B vs Nova 2 Lite

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.

Nova 2 Lite

Amazon

Amazon Nova 2 Lite, released by Amazon Web Services on December 2, 2025, is a fast, cost-efficient reasoning model available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M token context window enabling extended document, video, and image analysis. It features three extended thinking intensity levels, built-in code interpreter, web grounding tools, and native support for text, image, video, and document input. Nova 2 Lite targets cost-sensitive agentic applications, document analysis pipelines, and real-time workloads requiring multimodal reasoning.