Granite 4.2 3B vs MiniMax-M3

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 3B by IBM or MiniMax-M3 by MiniMax? 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

MiniMaxMiniMax-M3Off the frontier

Intelligence: 29.20
Total cost: $538

Verdict

Depends on your budget

MiniMax-M3 scores 20.1 points higher (29.2 vs 9.1) but costs 36× as much to run the benchmark ($538 vs $14.9; premium vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick MiniMax-M3 when you need intelligence above 9.1, and Granite 4.2 3B when 9.1 is enough.

Metric	Granite 4.2 3B	MiniMax-M3	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	9.1	29.2	+220.9% MiniMax-M3 is 3.2× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$14.91	$537.98	+3508.2% MiniMax-M3 is 36× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	49.98s	25.25s	−49.5% MiniMax-M3 is 49.5% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.03 / $0.12	$0.30 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image, Video

MiniMax-M3 vs Granite 4.2 3B: 220.9% more intelligence, 3508.2% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 49.5% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 3B: what beats it MiniMax-M3: 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.
MiniMax-M3 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.

Granite 4.2 3BMiniMax-M3Today'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/minimax-m3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/minimax-m3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill