Granite 4.2 8B vs Ministral 3 3B

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Ministral 3 3B by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

IBMGranite 4.2 8BOff the frontier

Intelligence: 11.10
Total cost: $53.1

MistralMinistral 3 3BOn the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 4.80
Total cost: $12.2

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Granite 4.2 8B scores 6.3 points higher (11.1 vs 4.8) but costs 4.3× as much to run the benchmark ($53.1 vs $12.2; mid-range vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Granite 4.2 8B when you need intelligence above 4.8, and Ministral 3 3B when 4.8 is enough.

Metric	Granite 4.2 8B	Ministral 3 3B	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	11.1	4.8	−56.8% Ministral 3 3B is 56.8% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$53.07	$12.23	−77.0% Ministral 3 3B is 77.0% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	63.67s	3.07s	−95.2% Ministral 3 3B is 95.2% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.06 / $0.25	$0.10 / $0.10
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Ministral 3 3B vs Granite 4.2 8B: 56.8% less intelligence, 77.0% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 95.2% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 8B: what beats it Ministral 3 3B: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Granite 4.2 8B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (High) scores 32.90 for $47.9.
Ministral 3 3B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

Granite 4.2 8BMinistral 3 3BToday'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-4-2-8b/ministral-3-3b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/ministral-3-3b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill