# Granite 4.2 8B vs Grok 3

> Granite 4.2 8B and Grok 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.5 vs 39.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/granite-4-2-8b-vs-grok-3
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 11

## Summary

- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 8B scores higher in 2 categories and Grok 3 in 5 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Granite 4.2 8B leads 26.6 to 13.7.
- Granite 4.2 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | xAI |
| Noometry Index | 40.5 | 39.9 |
| Rank | 148 | 157 |
| Context | 131K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.06 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.25 | — |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.5 (#137)
- Grok 3: 41.9 (#115)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | 1432 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 53.3% |
| WeirdML | — | 37.2% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- Grok 3: 30.5 (#76)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BALROG | — | 29.5% |

## Reasoning

- Granite 4.2 8B: 26.6 (#131)
- Grok 3: 13.7 (#333)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1329 | 1434 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 0% |
| SimpleBench | — | 36.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 61.3% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 5.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 138.33 |

## Math

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- Grok 3: 38.0 (#145)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | 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

- Granite 4.2 8B: 38.4 (#145)
- Grok 3: 46.2 (#82)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1384 | 1421 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 75.8% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 78.8% |
| Confabulations | — | 14.2% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.8% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 65% |

## Multilingual

- Granite 4.2 8B: 44.5 (#178)
- Grok 3: 52.3 (#87)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1302 | 1410 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1366 | 1448 |
| LMArena Russian | 1285 | 1416 |
| LMArena French | — | 1460 |
| LMArena German | — | 1431 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1387 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1373 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1417 |

## Instruction Following

- Granite 4.2 8B: 68.7 (#184)
- Grok 3: 75.0 (#73)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1301 | 1409 |
| IFEval | — | 88.4% |

## Long Context

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.3 (#159)
- Grok 3: 38.7 (#192)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1324 | 1439 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 58.3% |

## Writing & Preference

- Granite 4.2 8B: 49.6 (#189)
- Grok 3: 55.8 (#141)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Grok 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1320 | 1426 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1236 | 1414 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1301 | 1425 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 76.4% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1186 |
| WildBench | — | 84.9% |

## FAQ

### Is Granite 4.2 8B better than Grok 3?

Granite 4.2 8B and Grok 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.5 vs 39.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Granite 4.2 8B or Grok 3 better for coding?

Grok 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.9 versus 40.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 8B and Grok 3 share?

11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 8B has 11 scored results on Noometry and Grok 3 has 40.