Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Gemma 4 26B A4B scored 15.0% and Nova Micro 1.0 22.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Nova Micro 1.0 is 12× cheaper per question as billed ($0.000087 vs $0.0011), reasoning tokens included.
- Output speed is similar (172 vs 180 tokens per second).
- Nova Micro 1.0 starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 0.7 s for Gemma 4 26B A4B.
- Gemma 4 26B A4B accepts more context: 262k tokens against 128k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemma 4 26B A4B for open weights you can run yourself, a 262k-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (15 against 1). Choose Nova Micro 1.0 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00039 against $0.0072), a quicker first token and shorter outputs (about 545 tokens per question against 3,722). The widest subject gap is in economics: Nova Micro 1.0 answered 6 of 9 correctly, Gemma 4 26B A4B 4 of 9. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -7.5 points (z = -1.22). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.