Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3.7 Max

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Qwen3.7 Max by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

IBMGranite 4.2 8BOff the frontier

Intelligence: 11.10
Total cost: $53.1

AlibabaQwen3.7 MaxOff the frontier

Intelligence: 29.50
Total cost: $2277

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Qwen3.7 Max scores 18.4 points higher (29.5 vs 11.1) but costs 43× as much to run the benchmark ($2277 vs $53.1; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.7 Max when you need intelligence above 11.1, and Granite 4.2 8B when 11.1 is enough.

Metric	Granite 4.2 8B	Qwen3.7 Max	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	11.1	29.5	+165.8% Qwen3.7 Max is 2.7× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$53.07	$2,277.12	+4190.8% Qwen3.7 Max is 43× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	46.99s	16.62s	−64.6% Qwen3.7 Max is 64.6% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.06 / $0.25	$2.50 / $7.50
Input modalities	Text	Text

Qwen3.7 Max vs Granite 4.2 8B: 165.8% more intelligence, 4190.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 64.6% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 8B: what beats it Qwen3.7 Max: 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.
Qwen3.7 Max is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.

Granite 4.2 8BQwen3.7 MaxToday'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/qwen3-7-max · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/qwen3-7-max?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill