Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scored 75.0% and Muse Spark Open 77.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite is 1.3× cheaper per question as billed ($0.0034 vs $0.0045), reasoning tokens included.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite generates text 1.9× faster: 409 tokens per second against 220.
- Muse Spark Open starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 1.1 s for Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0045 against $0.0058) and faster streaming. Choose Muse Spark Open for a quicker first token, open weights you can run yourself and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (6 against 2).
Accuracy gap -2.5 points (z = -0.37). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.