Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Gemma 4 26B A4B scored 15.0% and Granite 4.0 Micro 25.0% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Granite 4.0 Micro is 21× cheaper per question as billed ($0.000051 vs $0.0011), reasoning tokens included.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B generates text 4.5× faster: 172 tokens per second against 38.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B accepts more context: 262k tokens against 131k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B for faster streaming, a 262k-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (15 against 1). Choose Granite 4.0 Micro for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0002 against $0.0072) and shorter outputs (about 403 tokens per question against 3,722). The widest subject gap is in humanities & social science: Granite 4.0 Micro answered 5 of 9 correctly, Gemma 4 26B A4B 2 of 9. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -10.0 points (z = -1.58). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.