My first impression after testing Gemma 4 against Qwen 3.5

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I have been doing some early comparisons between Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5, including a frontend generation task and a broader look at the benchmark picture.

My overall impression is that Gemma 4 is good. It feels clearly improved and the frontend results were actually solid. The model can produce attractive layouts, follow the structure of the prompt well, and deliver usable output. So this is definitely not a case of Gemma being bad.

That said, I still came away feeling that Qwen 3.5 was better in these preliminary tests. In the frontend task, both models did well, but Qwen seemed to have a more consistent edge in overall quality, especially in polish, coherence, and execution of the design requirements.

The prompt was not trivial. It asked for a landing page in English for an advanced AI assistant, with Tailwind CSS, glassmorphism, parallax effects, scroll triggered animations, micro interactions, and a stronger aesthetic direction instead of generic AI looking design. Under those conditions, Gemma 4 performed well, but Qwen 3.5 still felt slightly ahead.

Looking at the broader picture, that impression also seems to match the benchmark trend. The two families are relatively close in the larger model tier, but Qwen 3.5 appears stronger on core text and coding benchmarks overall. Gemma 4 seems more competitive in multilingual tasks and some vision related areas, which is a real strength, but in reasoning, coding, and general output quality, Qwen still looks stronger to me right now.

Another practical point is model size. Gemma 4 is good, but the stronger variants are also larger, which makes them less convenient for people trying to run models on more limited local hardware. For example, if someone is working with a machine that has around 8 GB of VRAM, that becomes a much more important factor in real use. In practice, this makes Qwen feel a bit more accessible in some setups.

So my first impression is simple. Gemma 4 is a strong release and a real improvement, but Qwen 3.5 still seems better overall in my early testing, and it keeps an advantage in frontend generation quality as well.