Side-by-side comparison of Gemma 4 (Google · USA) and MiniCPM5-1B (OpenBMB) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Gemma 4 is rated EU-ready; MiniCPM5-1B is conditional. They part ways on commercial use: Gemma 4 is "Yes", MiniCPM5-1B is "Unrestricted".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | EU-ready Major licence shift from Gemma 2/3: Apache 2.0 across the family. 140+ languages, multimodal (text/image/audio/video on small sizes), 128K-256K context. Strong permissive default for EU deployments that need robust multilingual support. | Conditional Per the published Apache 2.0 LICENSE, the 1.08B-parameter weights carry no use restrictions and are well suited to on-device or edge deployments. Unusually for a Chinese-origin release, OpenBMB ships a full data card naming every pre-training and SFT corpus, which closes the AI Act Art. 53 transparency gap most peers leave open. The remaining hedge for regulated EU buyers is vendor jurisdiction (Tsinghua-affiliated lab, mainland China) — self-host the weights and treat any vendor-side service as out of scope. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-05-30 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Partial | Documented |
| Origin | USA | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 32/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.