Model comparison
Granite 4.2 8B vs Grok-3 mini
Granite 4.2 8B and Grok-3 mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.5 vs 41.2), 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 8B scores higher in 1 category and Grok-3 mini in 6 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Granite 4.2 8B leads 26.6 to 13.6.
- Granite 4.2 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | xAI |
| Noometry Index | 40.5 | 41.2 |
| Released | — | 2025-04-09 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | 131K | — |
| Max output | 118K | — |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.06 | — |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.25 | — |
| Results tracked | 11 | 35 |
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Category by category
Coding Too close to call
Granite 4.2 8B: 40.5 (#137), Grok-3 mini: 40.8 (#131)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | 1379 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 49.3% |
| WeirdML | — | 42.6% |
Reasoning Granite 4.2 8B leads
Granite 4.2 8B: 26.6 (#131), Grok-3 mini: 13.6 (#334)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1329 | 1375 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 0.4% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 61.3% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 16.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 140.35 |
Math Not comparable
Granite 4.2 8B: —, Grok-3 mini: 42.1 (#85)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 77.8% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 31.8% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1386 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 90.9% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 5.9% |
Knowledge Grok-3 mini leads
Granite 4.2 8B: 38.4 (#145), Grok-3 mini: 46.4 (#81)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1384 | 1395 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 76.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 79.9% |
| Confabulations | — | 10.8% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 67.5% |
Multilingual Grok-3 mini leads
Granite 4.2 8B: 44.5 (#178), Grok-3 mini: 48.1 (#145)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1302 | 1352 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1366 | 1387 |
| LMArena Russian | 1285 | 1353 |
| LMArena French | — | 1357 |
| LMArena German | — | 1349 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1342 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1335 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1381 |
Instruction Following Grok-3 mini leads
Granite 4.2 8B: 68.7 (#184), Grok-3 mini: 78.5 (#9)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1301 | 1357 |
| IFEval | — | 95.1% |
Long Context Too close to call
Granite 4.2 8B: 40.3 (#159), Grok-3 mini: 41.0 (#147)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1324 | 1372 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 66.7% |
Writing & Preference Grok-3 mini leads
Granite 4.2 8B: 49.6 (#189), Grok-3 mini: 52.5 (#169)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok-3 mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1320 | 1370 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1236 | 1342 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1301 | 1355 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 73.5% |
| WildBench | — | 65.1% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Granite 4.2 8B better than Grok-3 mini?
Granite 4.2 8B and Grok-3 mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.5 vs 41.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Granite 4.2 8B or Grok-3 mini better for coding?
They score almost the same on coding (40.5 vs 40.8); test both on your own repository before choosing.
How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 8B and Grok-3 mini share?
11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 8B has 11 scored results on Noometry and Grok-3 mini has 35.