Granite 4.2 3B vs Mistral Small 3.1

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 3B by IBM or Mistral Small 3.1 by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Clear winner

IBMGranite 4.2 3BOn the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 9.10
Total cost: $14.9

MistralMistral Small 3.1Off the frontier

Intelligence: 7.10
Total cost: $27.8

Verdict

Pick Granite 4.2 3B

Mistral Small 3.1 vs Granite 4.2 3B: 22.0% less intelligence, 86.6% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 76.5% faster end-to-end.

Metric	Granite 4.2 3B	Mistral Small 3.1	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	9.1	7.1	−22.0% Mistral Small 3.1 is 22.0% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$14.91	$27.82	+86.6% Mistral Small 3.1 is 86.6% more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	49.98s	11.75s	−76.5% Mistral Small 3.1 is 76.5% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.03 / $0.12	$0.08 / $0.14
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 3B: what beats it Mistral Small 3.1: 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.
Mistral Small 3.1 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

Granite 4.2 3BMistral Small 3.1Today'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/mistral-small-3-1 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-3b/mistral-small-3-1?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill