Granite 4.2 3B vs Grok 4.3 (High)

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 3B by IBM or Grok 4.3 (High) by SpaceXAI? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

IBMGranite 4.2 3BOn the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 9.10
Total cost: $14.9

SpaceXAIGrok 4.3 (High)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 24.90
Total cost: $363

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Grok 4.3 (High) scores 15.8 points higher (24.9 vs 9.1) but costs 24× as much to run the benchmark ($363 vs $14.9; mid-range vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Grok 4.3 (High) when you need intelligence above 9.1, and Granite 4.2 3B when 9.1 is enough.

Metric	Granite 4.2 3B	Grok 4.3 (High)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	9.1	24.9	+173.6% Grok 4.3 (High) is 2.7× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$14.91	$363.24	+2336.2% Grok 4.3 (High) is 24× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	49.42s	27.84s	−43.7% Grok 4.3 (High) is 43.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.03 / $0.12	$1.25 / $2.50
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Grok 4.3 (High) vs Granite 4.2 3B: 173.6% more intelligence, 2336.2% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 43.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 3B: what beats it Grok 4.3 (High): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Granite 4.2 3B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
Grok 4.3 (High) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.

Granite 4.2 3BGrok 4.3 (High)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/grok-4-3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/grok-4-3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill