Model comparison
Granite 4.2 3b vs Grok 3
Granite 4.2 3b and Grok 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.4 vs 39.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 11 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 3b scores higher in 2 categories and Grok 3 in 5 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Granite 4.2 3b leads 26.0 to 13.7.
- Granite 4.2 3b has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | xAI |
| Noometry Index | 39.4 | 39.9 |
| Released | — | 2025-04-09 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | — | — |
| Max output | — | — |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | — |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | — |
| Results tracked | 11 | 40 |
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Category by category
Coding Grok 3 leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 40.0 (#151), Grok 3: 41.9 (#115)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1361 | 1432 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 53.3% |
| WeirdML | — | 37.2% |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Granite 4.2 3b: —, Grok 3: 30.5 (#76)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BALROG | — | 29.5% |
Reasoning Granite 4.2 3b leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 26.0 (#138), Grok 3: 13.7 (#333)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1306 | 1434 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 0% |
| SimpleBench | — | 36.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 61.3% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 5.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 138.33 |
Math Not comparable
Granite 4.2 3b: —, Grok 3: 38.0 (#145)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 55.6% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 46.4% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1391 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 88.7% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 3.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 0% |
Knowledge Grok 3 leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 36.3 (#171), Grok 3: 46.2 (#82)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1315 | 1421 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 75.8% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 78.8% |
| Confabulations | — | 14.2% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.8% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 65% |
Multilingual Grok 3 leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 42.1 (#198), Grok 3: 52.3 (#87)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1268 | 1410 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1269 | 1448 |
| LMArena Russian | 1249 | 1416 |
| LMArena French | — | 1460 |
| LMArena German | — | 1431 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1387 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1373 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1417 |
Instruction Following Grok 3 leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 67.1 (#200), Grok 3: 75.0 (#73)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1273 | 1409 |
| IFEval | — | 88.4% |
Long Context Too close to call
Granite 4.2 3b: 39.2 (#185), Grok 3: 38.7 (#192)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1291 | 1439 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 58.3% |
Writing & Preference Grok 3 leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 47.2 (#212), Grok 3: 55.8 (#141)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1293 | 1426 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1205 | 1414 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1290 | 1425 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 76.4% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1186 |
| WildBench | — | 84.9% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Granite 4.2 3b better than Grok 3?
Granite 4.2 3b and Grok 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.4 vs 39.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Granite 4.2 3b or Grok 3 better for coding?
Grok 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.9 versus 40.0 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 3b and Grok 3 share?
11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 3b has 11 scored results on Noometry and Grok 3 has 40.