Granite 4.2 30B vs Qwen3 Coder Next
Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 30B by IBM or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Granite 4.2 30B
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Granite 4.2 30B: 27.6% less intelligence, 265.5% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 88.0% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Granite 4.2 30B | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 12.7 | 9.2 | −27.6% Qwen3 Coder Next is 27.6% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $110.83 | $405.10 | +265.5% Qwen3 Coder Next is 3.7× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 51.51s | 6.20s | −88.0% Qwen3 Coder Next is 88.0% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.16 / $0.65 | $0.31 / $1.00 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Granite 4.2 30B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Flash scores 37.90 for $110.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.
Granite 4.2 30BQwen3 Coder NextToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-30b/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-30b/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill