Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Clear winner

IBMGranite 4.2 8BOff the frontier

Intelligence: 11.10
Total cost: $53.1

AlibabaQwen3 Coder NextOff the frontier

Intelligence: 9.20
Total cost: $405

Verdict

Pick Granite 4.2 8B

Qwen3 Coder Next vs Granite 4.2 8B: 17.1% less intelligence, 663.3% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 83.6% faster end-to-end.

Metric	Granite 4.2 8B	Qwen3 Coder Next	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	11.1	9.2	−17.1% Qwen3 Coder Next is 17.1% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$53.07	$405.10	+663.3% Qwen3 Coder Next is 7.6× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	39.25s	6.44s	−83.6% Qwen3 Coder Next is 83.6% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.06 / $0.25	$0.31 / $1.00
Input modalities	Text	Text

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Granite 4.2 8B: what beats it Qwen3 Coder Next: 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 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.

Granite 4.2 8BQwen3 Coder NextToday'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-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill