Head-to-head comparison
North Mini Code (Cohere) and Gemma 3 27B (Google) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 13 September 2026
As of 13 September 2026, Gemma 3 27B holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#117 vs #129); North Mini Code is cheaper per output token (Free/1M vs $0.45/1M); North Mini Code offers the longer context window (256K vs 131K tokens); and North Mini Code ships open weights.
Evidence: 3 reported rows against measured corpus ladders (57%); publisher-corpus-prior over 186 held-out anchors (43%); shrunk 13.7 toward the measured corpus · 2 public benchmark observations across 2 boards. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
Want a different pairing? Open the interactive comparison tool to swap either model for any current ranked language model.
Gemma 3 27B ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 13 September 2026: #117 against #129. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it. Their published uncertainty intervals overlap, so the rank difference alone does not establish a reliable capability advantage for your workload.
North Mini Code is cheaper on output tokens: Free/1M against $0.45/1M. Input tokens are Free/1M for North Mini Code and $0.08/1M for Gemma 3 27B. Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens. For 1,000 requests with 2,000 input and 500 output tokens each (2M input + 0.5M output), the listed-rate estimate is $0 for North Mini Code versus $0.39 for Gemma 3 27B. North Mini Code costs 100.0% less in this scenario. This excludes caching, batch discounts, prompt-length tiers, tool charges and retries; verify the selected endpoint before budgeting.
North Mini Code has the larger context window: 256K tokens against 131K.
The two models do not share a coding benchmark board on ModelCap yet, so no head-to-head coding score is published; the ModelCap Index position is the closest overall signal.
North Mini Code: Open weights. Gemma 3 27B: Gated access. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 1 API provider for North Mini Code and 4 for Gemma 3 27B, from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 13 September 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.