Versus Engine
Gemma 3 (27B) vs Llama 3.1 405B
Specs, price and the one trade-off that actually decides it — Gemma 3 (27B) against Llama 3.1 405B, side by side.
Cheaper to start
Llama 3.1 405B
Has a free tier.
Best ecosystem
Tie
Neither lists native integrations.
Standout
Gemma 3 (27B)
Fits comfortably in 32GB of unified memory
Gemma 3 (27B)
Google's 27B open-weights model, tuned to fit machines with 32GB of unified memory.
Where it wins, where it doesn't
Pros
- Fits comfortably in 32GB of unified memory
- Matches or beats the previous generation of 70B models
- Native multimodal capability at this size
Cons
- Google's licence carries commercial restrictions worth legal review
- Still needs mid-tier hardware at minimum
- Weaker fine-tuning ecosystem than Llama
Llama 3.1 405B
Meta's open-weights behemoth.
Where it wins, where it doesn't
Pros
- Open weights
- GPT-4 level reasoning
- High context length (131072)
- Large vocabulary size (128256)
Cons
- Requires massive VRAM to run locally
- Complex architecture with many parameters