Granite 4.2 8B vs Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) 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 8BOff the frontier

Intelligence: 11.10
Total cost: $53.1

MistralMistral Small 4 (Reasoning)On the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 11.30
Total cost: $42.5

Verdict

Pick Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)

Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) vs Granite 4.2 8B: 1.8% more intelligence, 19.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 64.9% faster end-to-end.

Metric	Granite 4.2 8B	Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	11.1	11.3	+1.8% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 1.8% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$53.07	$42.50	−19.9% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 19.9% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	41.16s	14.45s	−64.9% Mistral Small 4 (Reas… is 64.9% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.06 / $0.25	$0.15 / $0.60
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 8B: what beats it Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning): 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.
Mistral Small 4 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Medium) scores 29.90 for $31.2.

Granite 4.2 8BMistral Small 4 (Reasoning)Today'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/mistral-small-4 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/mistral-small-4?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill