Compare / Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3 8B

Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3 8B

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 48.5. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 3 and 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

Pick Qwen3 8B if…

you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Granite 4.2 8B	Qwen3 8B
Small LM Index	63.5 (likely 62–65)	48.5 (likely 44–53)
Lab	IBM (Granite) · United States	Alibaba (Qwen) · China
Released	2026-08-07	2025-04-29
Parameters	8B (dense)	8.2B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~6.9 GB	~6.8 GB
Context window	131K tokens	131K tokens
Input	text	text
Reasoning	No thinking	Hybrid (thinking on/off)
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.082 ($0.060 in, $0.15 out)	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	71.2K	7.5M

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	Qwen3 8B
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	74.0	≈ 71
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	64.1	62.0
AIME Math	86.7	67.3
LiveCodeBench Coding	73.2	57.5
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 Qwen3 8B?

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 48.5. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 3 and 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?

Both have a 131K-token context window.

Can I use Granite 4.2 8B and Qwen3 8B commercially?

Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.