# Granite 4.2 8B vs o3

> o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.5 to 40.5 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.2 8B costs 33× 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-4-2-8b-vs-o3
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 11

## Summary

- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 8B scores higher in 0 categories and o3 in 7 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where o3 leads 54.6 to 38.4.
- Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper at $0.06 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $8 for o3.
- o3 accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 131K.
- Granite 4.2 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 40.5 | 47.5 |
| Rank | 148 | 61 |
| Context | 131K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.06 | $2 |
| Output $/M | $0.25 | $8 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.5 (#137)
- o3: 46.8 (#64)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | 1408 |
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 62.3% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 58.4% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 81.3% |
| GSO | — | 8.8% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.4% |
| CadEval | — | 74% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 933.55 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- o3: 34.5 (#44)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | 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 4.2 8B: 26.6 (#131)
- o3: 32.0 (#78)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1329 | 1402 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.5% |
| SimpleBench | — | 53.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 60.8% |
| CritPt | — | 1.4% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 38% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 13.1% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 29% |
| DTBench | — | 84.8% |
| LMCA | — | 39.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 146.86 |
| ForecastBench | — | 62.5 |

## Math

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- o3: 50.2 (#58)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 33.3% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 84.4% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 71.4% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1426 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 18.7% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 2.1% |

## Knowledge

- Granite 4.2 8B: 38.4 (#145)
- o3: 54.6 (#52)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1384 | 1402 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 81.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 20.3% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 49.4% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 85.9% |
| Confabulations | — | 14.4% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 75.3% |

## Multimodal

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- o3: 41.4 (#36)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1214 |
| GeoBench | — | 74% |
| VPCT | — | 52% |

## Multilingual

- Granite 4.2 8B: 44.5 (#178)
- o3: 51.7 (#105)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1302 | 1401 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1366 | 1437 |
| LMArena Russian | 1285 | 1406 |
| LMArena French | — | 1430 |
| LMArena German | — | 1420 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1403 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1370 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1395 |

## Instruction Following

- Granite 4.2 8B: 68.7 (#184)
- o3: 72.8 (#127)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1301 | 1368 |
| IFEval | — | 86.9% |

## Long Context

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.3 (#159)
- o3: 53.3 (#6)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1324 | 1372 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 88.9% |
| CL-bench | — | 17.8% |

## Writing & Preference

- Granite 4.2 8B: 49.6 (#189)
- o3: 63.5 (#64)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1320 | 1410 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1236 | 1359 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1301 | 1405 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 83.9% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1676 |
| WildBench | — | 86.1% |

## FAQ

### Is Granite 4.2 8B better than o3?

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.5 to 40.5 on the Noometry Index. Granite 4.2 8B costs 33× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Granite 4.2 8B or o3?

Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.06 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; o3 lists at $2 and $8.

### Is Granite 4.2 8B or o3 better for coding?

o3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 46.8 versus 40.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

o3 does, with 200K tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 8B and o3 share?

11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 8B has 11 scored results on Noometry and o3 has 63.