# Granite 4.0 Micro vs o3

> o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.4 to 28.8 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.0 Micro costs 86× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/granite-4-0-micro-vs-o3
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.0 Micro scores higher in 0 categories and o3 in 5 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where o3 leads 54.5 to 9.9.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 2.8% for Granite 4.0 Micro and 84.4% for o3.
- Granite 4.0 Micro is cheaper at $0.017 / $0.11 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $8 for o3.
- o3 accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 131K.
- Granite 4.0 Micro has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 28.8 | 47.4 |
| Rank | 312 | 53 |
| Context | 131K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.017 | $2 |
| Output $/M | $0.11 | $8 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- o3: 47.3 (#57)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 62.3% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 58.4% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 81.3% |
| GSO | — | 8.8% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.4% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1408 |
| CadEval | — | 74% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 933.55 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- o3: 34.3 (#42)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 63% |
| GDPval | — | 30.8% |
| DeepResearch Bench | — | 45.2% |
| OSWorld | — | 23% |
| LMArena Search | — | 1144 |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 65.4% |

## Reasoning

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 18.5 (#261)
- o3: 32.1 (#66)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | 38% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.5% |
| SimpleBench | — | 53.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 60.8% |
| CritPt | — | 1.4% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 13.1% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1402 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 29% |
| DTBench | — | 84.8% |
| LMCA | — | 39.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 146.88 |
| ForecastBench | — | 62.5 |

## Math

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 11.2 (#301)
- o3: 48.9 (#49)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.8% | 84.4% |
| Omni-MATH | 20.9% | 71.4% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 33.3% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1426 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 18.7% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 2.1% |

## Knowledge

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 9.9 (#299)
- o3: 54.5 (#47)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 28.3% | 81.8% |
| MMLU-Pro | 39.5% | 85.9% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 30.7% | 75.3% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 20.3% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 49.4% |
| Confabulations | — | 14.4% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1403 |

## Multimodal

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- o3: 40.7 (#35)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1214 |
| GeoBench | — | 74% |
| VPCT | — | 52% |

## Multilingual

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- o3: 51.9 (#99)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1402 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1438 |
| LMArena French | — | 1430 |
| LMArena German | — | 1420 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1404 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1371 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1407 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1395 |

## Instruction Following

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 70.0 (#164)
- o3: 73.0 (#122)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 84.9% | 86.9% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1368 |

## Long Context

- Granite 4.0 Micro: —
- o3: 53.2 (#6)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 88.9% |
| CL-bench | — | 17.8% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1372 |

## Writing & Preference

- Granite 4.0 Micro: 46.7 (#212)
- o3: 63.7 (#62)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.0 Micro | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| WildBench | 67% | 86.1% |
| LMArena Text | — | 1410 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1359 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 83.9% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1676 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1405 |

## FAQ

### Is Granite 4.0 Micro better than o3?

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.4 to 28.8 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.0 Micro costs 86× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Granite 4.0 Micro or o3?

Granite 4.0 Micro is cheaper. It lists at $0.017 per million input tokens and $0.11 per million output tokens; o3 lists at $2 and $8.

### Which has the bigger context window?

o3 does, with 200K tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Granite 4.0 Micro and o3 share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.0 Micro has 8 scored results on Noometry and o3 has 63.