Compare / Granite 4.2 8B vs DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B
Granite 4.2 8B vs DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B
Updated November 2026
Verdict
Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 53.1. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 3 and DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B wins 0. Both need about 6.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Granite 4.2 8B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.082 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.
Pick Granite 4.2 8B if…
- you want the strongest model overall
- you mostly write code
- you need math and reasoning
- you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
- you work with long documents
Pick DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B if…
- you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)
Specifications
| Granite 4.2 8B | DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B | |
|---|---|---|
| Small LM Index | 63.5 (likely 62–65) | 53.1 (likely 48–58) |
| Lab | IBM (Granite) · United States | DeepSeek · China |
| Released | 2026-08-07 | 2025-05-29 |
| Parameters | 8B (dense) | 8.2B (dense) |
| Memory at 4-bit | ~6.9 GB | ~6.8 GB |
| Context window | 131K tokens | 128K tokens |
| Input | text | text |
| Reasoning | No thinking | Always thinks |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| API price / 1M tokens | $0.082 ($0.060 in, $0.15 out) | Self-host only |
| Hugging Face downloads (30 days) | 71.2K | 357.7K |
Benchmarks
Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro Knowledge | 74.0 | ≈ 74 |
| GPQA Diamond Knowledge | 64.1 | 61.1 |
| AIME Math | 86.7 | 76.3 |
| LiveCodeBench Coding | 73.2 | 60.5 |
| Terminal-Bench Agentic | 20.6 | — |
| IFBench Instruction following | 79.3 | — |
| BFCL Agentic | 52.4 | — |
| HMMT Math | 78.3 | — |
Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.
Questions
Which is better, Granite 4.2 8B or DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B?
Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 53.1. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 3 and DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B wins 0.
Which is cheaper to run?
Only Granite 4.2 8B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.082 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 6.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.
Which has the longer context window?
Granite 4.2 8B has the longer context window: 131K tokens against 128K.
Can I use Granite 4.2 8B and DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B commercially?
Granite 4.2 8B is released under Apache-2.0 and DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B under MIT. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.
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