Granite 4.2 8B vs Ministral 3 8B

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Ministral 3 8B 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 8BOff the frontier

Intelligence: 5.50
Total cost: $27.5

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Granite 4.2 8B scores 5.6 points higher (11.1 vs 5.5) but costs 1.9× as much to run the benchmark ($53.1 vs $27.5; mid-range vs budget cost classes). Pick Granite 4.2 8B when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Ministral 3 8B.

Metric	Granite 4.2 8B	Ministral 3 8B	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	11.1	5.5	−50.5% Ministral 3 8B is 50.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$53.07	$27.47	−48.2% Ministral 3 8B is 48.2% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	63.67s	5.26s	−91.7% Ministral 3 8B is 91.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.06 / $0.25	$0.15 / $0.15
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Ministral 3 8B vs Granite 4.2 8B: 50.5% less intelligence, 48.2% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 91.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 8B: what beats it Ministral 3 8B: 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 8B 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 8BToday'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-3-8b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/ministral-3-8b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill