Gemini 3 Flash Preview vs Llama 4 Scout

Pricing math

Gemini 3 Flash Preview costs $0.5/M input and $3.0/M output from Google; on OpenKey that's $0.515/M input and $3.09/M output (provider price x 1.03). Llama 4 Scout costs $0.1/M input and $0.3/M output from the provider, or $0.103/M and $0.309/M on OpenKey. That's a 5x gap on input price. Run the numbers on a 10M-input/2M-output workload and Gemini comes to $11.00 total while Scout comes to $1.60 — a difference that matters if you're processing large batches and don't need Gemini's reasoning tier.

Coding and agentic performance

On Design Arena's coding category, Gemini 3 Flash Preview scores 1239 elo (rank 33) versus Scout's 839 elo (rank 106). In gamedev, Gemini hits 1232 elo (rank 38) against Scout's 838 elo (rank 105). Website category: Gemini 1239 elo (rank 33) versus Scout's 793 elo (rank 112). Gemini also has agentic-specific benchmarks — fullstack (1130 elo, rank 17), webapps (1185 elo, rank 17), mobileapps (1188 elo, rank 17) — categories Scout doesn't appear in. Artificial Analysis separately scores Scout's agentic index at just 1.1 and coding index at 8.2, both low. If you're building an agent that writes or debugs code, this isn't close.

Context and long-document work

Scout's 10,000,000-token context window is roughly 10x Gemini's 1,048,576 tokens (context ratio 0.1 in Gemini's favor of size, meaning Gemini has a tenth of Scout's window). If your job is ingesting a huge codebase, log archive, or document set in one pass and Scout's coding weaknesses don't matter for the task, that window size is a real advantage. Gemini's max output is also larger — 65,535 tokens versus Scout's 16,384 — which matters more for generation-heavy tasks than for pure ingestion.

Modality and tooling

Gemini 3 Flash Preview takes text, image, file, audio, and video input and supports reasoning effort levels (high, medium, low, minimal) plus tool calling, structured outputs, and seed control. Scout takes text and image only, with no reasoning mode, but supports a broader set of sampling parameters (top_k, min_p, repetition_penalty, frequency_penalty, presence_penalty) that Gemini lacks. If your pipeline needs audio or video understanding, Scout is out. If you need fine-grained sampling control on a classic completion API, Scout gives you more knobs.

When to pick each

Use Gemini 3 Flash Preview for agentic coding, tool-calling workflows, multi-turn chat where reasoning quality matters, and any task involving audio or video input. Use Llama 4 Scout for high-volume text or image tasks where cost per token dominates the decision and the context window needs to span millions of tokens — things like bulk summarization, retrieval-heavy pipelines, or classification at scale where coding ability is irrelevant.

Questions

Which is cheaper, Gemini 3 Flash Preview or Llama 4 Scout?

Llama 4 Scout is cheaper by a wide margin: $0.103/M input and $0.309/M output on OpenKey versus Gemini's $0.515/M and $3.09/M. On a 10M-input/2M-output workload, that's $1.60 for Scout versus $11.00 for Gemini — a 5x gap on input pricing alone.

Which model has the bigger context window?

Llama 4 Scout, with a 10,000,000-token context window versus Gemini 3 Flash Preview's 1,048,576 tokens. That's roughly 10x more context, useful for ingesting very large documents or codebases in a single call.

Which model is better for coding?

Gemini 3 Flash Preview. On Design Arena's codecategories benchmark it scores 1239 elo (rank 33) versus Scout's 839 elo (rank 106). Artificial Analysis also scores Scout's coding index at just 8.2, well below Gemini's demonstrated coding results.

Does either model support audio or video input?

Only Gemini 3 Flash Preview. It accepts text, image, file, audio, and video input. Llama 4 Scout supports just text and image, so any workload needing audio or video understanding requires Gemini.