Compare / Granite 4.2 8B vs Llama 3.1 8B

Granite 4.2 8B vs Llama 3.1 8B

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 21.3. On the 2 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 2 and Llama 3.1 8B wins 0. Both need about 6.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Llama 3.1 8B is cheaper through an API: $0.025 per million tokens against $0.082.

Pick Granite 4.2 8B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you work with long documents
you need a permissive license (Apache-2.0)

Pick Llama 3.1 8B if…

API cost matters most
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Granite 4.2 8B	Llama 3.1 8B
Small LM Index	63.5 (likely 62–65)	21.3 (likely 15–29)
Lab	IBM (Granite) · United States	Meta · United States
Released	2026-08-07	2024-07-23
Parameters	8B (dense)	8B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~6.9 GB	~6.6 GB
Context window	131K tokens	128K tokens
Input	text	text
Reasoning	No thinking	No thinking
License	Apache-2.0	Llama 3.1 Community
API price / 1M tokens	$0.082 ($0.060 in, $0.15 out)	$0.025 ($0.020 in, $0.040 out)
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	71.2K	4.5M

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	Llama 3.1 8B
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	74.0	48.3
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	64.1	30.4
AIME Math	86.7	≈ 18
LiveCodeBench Coding	73.2	≈ 21
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 Llama 3.1 8B?

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 21.3. On the 2 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 2 and Llama 3.1 8B wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Llama 3.1 8B is cheaper through an API: $0.025 per million tokens against $0.082. 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 Llama 3.1 8B commercially?

Granite 4.2 8B is released under Apache-2.0 and Llama 3.1 8B under Llama 3.1 Community. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.