Granite 4.2 3B vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 3B by IBM or MiniMax-M3.1-Flash 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-M3.1-FlashOff the frontier

Intelligence: 42.70
Total cost: $283

Verdict

Depends on your budget

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash scores 33.6 points higher (42.7 vs 9.1) but costs 19× as much to run the benchmark ($283 vs $14.9; mid-range vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick MiniMax-M3.1-Flash when you need intelligence above 9.1, and Granite 4.2 3B when 9.1 is enough.

Metric	Granite 4.2 3B	MiniMax-M3.1-Flash	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	9.1	42.7	+369.2% MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is 4.7× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$14.91	$283.18	+1799.3% MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is 19× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	49.98s	22.73s	−54.5% MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is 54.5% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.03 / $0.12	$0.15 / $0.60
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash vs Granite 4.2 3B: 369.2% more intelligence, 1799.3% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 54.5% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 3B: what beats it MiniMax-M3.1-Flash: 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-M3.1-Flash is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.

Granite 4.2 3BMiniMax-M3.1-FlashToday'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-m3-1-flash · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/minimax-m3-1-flash?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill